I have about a half-dozen pairs of Lewis Kilt Hose and traditional garter ties from the Scottish Tartans Museum. Although Matt offers a good selection of colors, I wanted a pair of each item in a pale yellow - a color not currently available.

Although I've used Rit dye for decades in various projects, I figured this was not a project for that old standby. Instead, I obtained some fiber reactive dye from Dharma Trading Company. Here's the result:



Unaltered cream hose are on the left, while a pair of cream hose I dyed yellow are on the right.

There are two colors of garters in this photo. The darker pair on the left were dyed first as a test and I decided they were darker than I wanted for my hose. I used ¼ the original amount of dye then dyed both the hose and the garters on the right at the same time. Even this result is darker than I wanted, so I'll probably try again with 1/16th the original amount of dye.

Dyeing the wool involved lots of hot water . . . I simmered the wool at 180° - 190° for 20 minutes. Dharma's instructions caution not to subject the wool to quick temperature changes to ward off fiber damage and felting. I picked 190°F as my arbitrary definition of what constitutes "simmer" - the term used by the the instructions for dyeing. I brought the dye bath up to temperature slowly and then cooled the socks slowly while rinsing them. My definition of slow temperature change was no more than 10°F change every 30 seconds. I used a digital thermometer to monitor the dye bath and rinse water temperature. Temporarily turning up my water heater gave me 150°F rinse water at the tap. I used this to dilute the dye bath and bring the temperature down before rinsing with pure hot water.

You can probably see that the dyed hose are a little bit smaller in the foot - I'd estimate about 5% shrinkage in the foot. Strangely, the calf part of the hose seems longer after dyeing. This may be from hanging to dry. The cream hose in this photo have been worn a few times without washing, so they've been stretched a little bit. Both pair of hose still fit me just fine. The garter dimensions were unaffected by the heat.

The hose and garters are both 50% wool and 50% acrylic. The garters seemed to take the dye a little better - and darker. The hose have a very slight mottling to them. I suspect this is either the acrylic taking the dye differently than the wool or a little residual oil left in the hose before dyeing. Because the natural oil present in wool would interfere with dyeing, I did wash all the wool in a textile detergent (Synthrapol) before dyeing to try and strip out as much oil as possible. Here's a closeup of the hose where you may be able to detect a little mottling:



The mottling is very subtle and nearly impossible to detect from more than about 18" away. The colors in these photos show true on my LCD monitor (Windows OS).

For those interested in specifics, I used Dharma Trading Company's 3A Clear Yellow and their Synthrapol SP textile detergent before and after dyeing. My final wash was with Eucalan no-rinse soap that leaves lanolin in the fabric. If you're interested in exact quantities of water, dye, salt and vinegar that produced this result, PM me for all the gory details. Total cost of supplies from Dharma was about $20.

I'll post more photos when I dye another set a lighter yellow.

Abax