Dyeing Horse Hair, Take 2

Late last year my friend Sara called me, and asked what kind of experience I had dyeing fiber. It turned out, after some back and forth, that she really needs sorrel colored horse hair (of which there is, evidently, a paucity from her usual suppliers) and asked could I figure out a way to dye sorrel colored horse hair.
      I put my artist's hat on, so to say, and commenced to dye. I achieved a really remarkable sorrel colored Targhee fleece, and emailed her the recipe. She tried it, and ended up with (I do not lie) fire engine red colored horse hair. It was, in her words, "truly alarming". So we dialogued some more . . . and one day in the mail was a package with approximately 3 lbs of horse hair.
     Well, Christmas and Dad's health issues intervened, and the horse hair sat very quietly in my fiber room. Finally it quit being quiet, and started to nag at me. As it nagged, I got apprehensive. I mean, three pounds is a lot, but I really wanted to maximize my chances of success.
     I began with repeated viewings of Deb Menz's outstanding video "Dyeing in the Kitchen" available from Interweave. If you haven't seen it, and are interested in learning to dye fiber, I can't recommend it enough.
     After the repeated viewings, I gathered my Greener Shades Dyes sampler kit, and suitable sized plastic containers, and mixed a lot of dye stock. That took some math, let me tell you, because I have avoided dealing with the metric system for most of my life, and lo and behold, here I go with the metric system. After my initial pain, it occurred to me that the metric system is really quite logical, and I think I might even like it. But that's another story.

Dye Stock ready for water

     This prompted a foray or two into the community to obtain metric measuring spoons and a few other doo-dads that I needed including a color wheel.
     Thus armed, I set out to plan my horse hair dyeing adventures. The good folks at Greener Shades have provided their dye book in electronic form, so away I went downloading. I picked 6 shades of browns that I thought would get close, and the 7th I did a combo of Jacquard dyes that I'd picked up at the art store when I bought the color wheel.  And began.

 Of the first seven batches I dyed, one was pretty darned close, three others were possible, two were bad, and one was an epic fail. But it gave me a good jumping off point.
     Today I died several kettlesful.

The third in this series is, I think, the clear winner. Tomorrow, back to the dye pot!