Friday, March 6, 2009

dyeing

I bought some bare sock yarn eons ago with the intention of dyeing it. I finally got around to it this week. Ohemgee it was so fun! There was a learning curve with this, but I'm happy with how it turned out for my first foray. In fact, I was so pleased, I bought more bare yarn and will dye it up when it arrives and I'm going to try my hand at selling it on Etsy. I'll post the info here when that's all set up (probably late next week). Worst case is that it doesn't sell and I've got some extra skeins of yarn to knit up and had some fun dyeing it!

But! Here are photos of my dyeing (I meant to photograph the whole process, but sort of forgot).

I keep the amount of chemicals in my house to a minimum, so buying a bunch of acid dyes didn't seem to fit into my philosophy on that. So, I chose to go the Kool Aid route. I also chose to use the microwave, because it seemed easiest.


I had to experiment with containers to find three that would fit in the microwave. Afterward, I remembered some smaller bowls I had and dontcha know they would've done the trick.

Part of the learning curve was the bleeding process. As you can see by the pink color, I actually ended up with a much larger chunk of that than I intended and it ended up nearly two different shades. However, I like the way it looks. There are also some white spots between colors where I anticipated more bleeding than their was.


And here are close-ups of the three colors I used. Strawberry:


Berry Blue:


And Lemon-Lime:


Here is the yarn twisted into a skein.



Finally, here is the yarn after I re-wound and skeined it to make it look prettier.

2 comments:

Mari said...

Such pretty Spring colors! I think it looks great. Can't wait to see your next skein.

I have yet to give dying a try for fear I would make a huge mess or get addicted. :)

TheBlackSheep said...

Nice! Can't wait to see what you knit it into to!

I think I'd choose spinning over dying personally. I'm actually actively choosing not to try either because I don't have enough time to accomodate more obsessions.

Did I tell you how much I love your Christmas present btw? If not, or even if I did, I really love it! Thank you!