If at first you don't succeed, dye, dye again.

In two of my previous posts, I began reviewing the process I have followed in processing yarn from fiber to fabric.  My last post on the subject led up to the point of immersing the yarn in the black bean water.
The yarn sat in the bean water for three days.  On the third day, mold began growing on the yarn itself, not the surface of the water.  I removed the yarn from the bean water and dumped the remaining dye.

Since the mold was growing on the yarn itself, I did my best to remove it by hand.  After doing this, the yarn still had a black goo on it from the mold.

The next step was washing the yarn.  I wanted to try to remove the black slime and also even out the Ph.  For this I made a bath of water and Dr. Bronner's.

The yarn that I purchased at Salvation Army had the worst mold damage and I am not sure it will be salvageable.  It picked up the color the best though and I ended up with a pale purplish grey.

The alpaca yarn that I made had much less mold damage and seems to have picked up a little color, but it is hard to tell what it will look like when it dries.

I hung the two up to dry in the bathroom.  It will likely take a few days until they are both dry.

I'm not sure what went wrong, but I'm pretty disappointed in the results.  One thing I will be sure to do next time is add sodium benzoate to the dye bath to keep it from molding.  I also think that there may have been an error with the mordant since neither of the yarns seemed to hold much color.

Although this first attempt at dyeing did not go well, I will still try again in the future.  I am not sure if I would go with black bean dye again however.  If you have any tips on what might have gone wrong, please let me know!