My first yarn dyeing attempt!
I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at dyeing yarn, thanks to the enablers at various Ravelry groups devoted to that very thing.
I knew it was meant to be when I went to my local supermarket last week, and found some good-sized Granitewear enamel pots on sale. They’re meant for cooking corn (hence, the lovely (?) yellow color), but at $3.75, it was too good a deal to pass up for yarn.
I have some Jacquard Acid dyes on hand, but, because I really can’t do anything the easy way, I dug through the dyes I had already prepared to do some Pysanky Easter Eggs. No, mine did not come out anything like the ones on that website, but that’s not the point. Since I only used a small bit of the batches of dye I had prepared, I figured I’d just go ahead and use those. Just because they’d been sitting around for, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half, was no reason not to use them.
I followed (sort of) the directions in this book for the hot pour method, since this seemed to me to be the least-messy introduction to dyeing.
I soaked the yarn (Knitpicks bare sock yarn) and then, after about an hour, started heating it with some vinegar added:
Heating up the yarn
Once it was in the neighborhood of 190 degrees (recommended in the book), I added yellow:
First color added
This didn’t strike as quickly as I would have liked, I don’t know whether it was too cool, or if there wasn’t enough vinegar, but, it’s a learning process, right?
Then, when the yellow was exhausted, I added turquoise:
Second color added
I LIKE IT!
After I added the turquoise, I hit the yarn with a little more vinegar, so the yellow areas wouldn’t blend completely into the green. I simmered for 10 minutes, then put it on the back porch to cool. The dye wasn’t exhausted at this point, and the yellow was slowly turning green, so I put more vinegar in, and WOW! The water was suddenly clear, and I knew the colors wouldn’t be mixing anymore. I wish I had added the extra vinegar earlier, after the green first went in, for more color changes, but I really like the way it came out.
Once it cooled, I rinsed the skein, and no color came out in the rinse water. Here it is hanging out on the line drying:
Finished!
Once it’s dry, I’ll put up a pic of the finished skein. With the rain and humidity we’re having, it may take several days to dry.
Overall, I really like the subtle color changes in here-it reminds me of Spring, with all the different shades of green.
August 7th, 2008 at 4:02 am
That doesn’t look too scary at all. I like the picture of the yarn in the pot where the yellow and green are cool looking discrete blobs.
I dyed yarn with the kids way back when, using Easter egg dyes after we finished dyeing eggs. We striped the yarn, and the kids knit rectangles that we stuffed into ball-shape. Fun project.
August 9th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I was thinking of doing this, I have some yarn I’d love to dye. You make it look very easy, thanks for sharing. And thank you for the nice comment on my blog.