Sunday, February 22, 2009

I finally bit the bullet and bought a stainless steel kettle for dyeing. I've been using a blue speckleware enameled pot, a generic cheap canning kettle, but after two years of acidic dye baths, the kettle was toast.



The acid has eaten through the enamel, and the bottom is all rusty. This is very bad, not only because it's rough and the yarn catches on it, but it also changes the colors of my dyes. It visibly dulls them down, makes them grayer, and makes it hard to get a clear light color. That's all well and good if you're doing natural dyeing and want the interaction with iron to act as a mordant or "sadden" the color, but that's not what I want for the dyeing I do.

So a couple weeks ago this came to live in my house:



It makes a world of difference. Not only are the colors clearer, they are easier to reproduce and because the pot has a heavy triple layer bottom, the stove doesn't have to be set as high to hold the temperature. With the old pot, I had to set the stove dial to halfway between Medium and Medium-High to maintain 180 degrees and it was tricky to find the spot that would be hot enough but not boil. With this pot, it only has to be halfway between Medium-Low and Medium, and it heats much more evenly.

Shiny AND energy-saving. Nice!

2 comments:

Leigh said...

Wow. Lovely pot. Interesting about how the pot effects the colors. Should make dyeing a whole lot more fun.

Cathy said...

That's exactly the info I need to buy a stainless steel kettle. My enamel ware toasted too.