Prior to a guild dye day I had an indigo dye pot that was not exhausted, but had been dormant for many months.  I warmed it up and gave it some more ingredients to wake it up and needed to test it to see if it would be OK for dyeing.  I wasn’t sure how strong the dye would be so decided I may as well exhaust it with my wool and prepare a new bath for the guild event.

As it turned out I had a few Clun Forest skeins that I had spun to build up stocks for future projects.  I prepared 5 skeins by soaking them overnights, then queezing out  surplus water by rolling them in towels.  They had 10 minutes in the indigo bath and then 20 minutes hanging before another 10 minute dip in the bath.  After 30 minutes hanging on the line I rinsed the skeins twice and then dried them on a rack over the next 24 hours.

The color was definitely not dark blue – see the small test skein of alpaca that was dyed in a brand new indigo bath – but it turns out to be a very nice egg-shell blue.

These skeins, along with a similar amount of non-dyed Clun Forest hand-spun are about to be put onto my ‘soon to be published’ shop.