Exhausting the Orange Cosmos

These last two posts are very belated, so a reader may have totally forgotten that the weld and cosmos baths I’m talking about were left over from my workshop at the annual spring conference of Mass.Ag. in the Classroom back on March 8th.

Compared to the questions raised by the weld exhaust process, the exhaustion of the orange cosmos bath was relatively straightforward. I only dyed woolen yarns, mordanted with aluminum sulfate. Below you can see the first exhaust skein in the dyebath:

skein in cosmos exhaust dyebath

Here are the colors of yarns once they were rinsed and dried!

Below is the first exhaust, on a two-ply yarn from Bartlett Yarns in Maine.

first cosmos exhaust

Below are all three exhausts side by side. The first is on the left, the second in the middle, and the third on the right. The second exhaust was also a yarn from Bartlett’s. The third was the last of my stash of a smooth, shiny Swedish rug yarn.

all three exhausts

All of these are pretty rough wool yarns so they will make their way into a rya one of these days.