Felting Wool and Dying with Rit Dye

My adventure with felting and dying wool began this week. I bought some wool from Jo-Ann Fabrics before it all disappeared and I also had some thrift wool jackets that I had deconstructed. It took a while to wash and dry of the wool and then cut it up into manageable pieces for dying. Somehow I ended up with a collection of Rit dye (I think it came from an auction and was part of a boxed lot) that I've wanted to experiment with for some time. As you can see one of the boxes is vintage and the rest are updated somewhat, but are still from a past decade.

I boiled the dye and water then added the wool. You could say that I cooked wool this week! The colors are tasty. Pastels, plaids and grungy rich wool!

I then rinsed and dried all of the wool again. I'm excited to use the plaids. I think they turned out to be quite rich and will make a wonderful background for my designs.

One thing I really liked about using Rit is that it's not toxic like some of the other dyes that you have to be a chemist to use. For my application the colors turned out the way I wanted. I may take some of the lighter colors and then overdye a little more to get a better mottled appearance.

It was a fun project and I will do it again, but I ended up with enough wool to last for quite a while. I should have taken a picture of the latex gloves that I wore --they were quite a sight!