Dyeing Day

My interests aren't limited only to knitting, you know.  There are a variety of "fiber arts" that float my boat.  For example, I would love to spin.  I want a spinning wheel.  But so far I have refrained due to several factors.  Number one, it would take up valuable real estate in our house, as would the many bags of fiber I would be certain to accumulate and hoard.  Second, it would be expensive - a decent wheel is usually $600-1000 plus accessories, and all of that sure-to-be-hoarded fiber isn't free.  Third, I unfortunately have a limited amount of time to devote to my hobbies.  If I added spinning, that would cut down on my knitting and reading.  (I can only wish that somehow it would reduce my time spent cooking or doing laundry.  Maybe if I could spin straw into gold....)  And finally, if I was spinning yarn, I'd have to knit it or my yarn stash would grow at a greater rate than it already is, plus we then go back to reason number three - more yarn but less time to knit.

But there is one yarny, fibery thing that I wanted to do that wouldn't take too much time and wouldn't increase my yarn stash too much (at least at first, because believe me, the potential is there) - dyeing my own yarn.  Start with natural, undyed yarn and before you know it - BAM!  Gorgeous yarn.  (Or a muddy-looking mess, but let's stay positive, shall we?)

A while back, I had posted somewhere on Ravelry.com that I wanted to attempt to dye yarn some day.  One of the other members saw my post and emailed me.  She lives about 20 minutes away and offered to have me to come to her house and having a dyeing day.  Uh-huh.  Twist my arm.  This was in early August and we decided to get together after my kids were back in school.

Kids + professional permanent dye = potential for disaster.

So we did it!  On September 19th, I made the short trek to her home with my little tote bag full of three skeins of blank-slate yarny goodness.  (Knit Picks Bare Fingering in merino/nylon).  Jennifer then proceeded to school me in yarn dyeing.

The first step is to make sure the yarn is tied at least four times around so that when it's being stirred in a pot of dye water, it doesn't end up being a tangled mess.  The Knit Picks skeins are only tied twice, so I added two more ties to each.

Next we had to soak the yarn for 20-30 minutes in water with a little wool soak.  The water temperature wasn't cold or hot - just middle of the road from the faucet.

For my first skein, I wanted to try to recreate a colorway by Grant Creek Yarn called Hollyhock.  It's a pretty light-to-midrange pink with splotches of darker, almost rusty pink on it.  I have around 12 skeins of GCY at $20-25 each, so I've been trying to be good and use some of it before buying more.  But this color called out to me and it was so hard to resist!  So I figured what the heck, I can at least try to make my own.

We started out mixing up dye in fuschia and brown.  The fuschia was screaming pink, so the brown toned it down quite a bit.  Once we got a color we liked (testing drops on a white paper towel), we added some of the resulting dye to a pot of simmering water on the stove and dumped in two skeins of yarn - one for each of us.  This is often referred to as kettle dyeing.  (Sounds more impressive than "dumping dye and yarn in a pot of water," doesn't it?)

We then started dropping in more of the dye as the yarn absorbed it since the color started out too light for what we wanted.  I also attempted to drop in dye without mixing to see if it would create the dramatic splotchy effect I was looking for.  It did give variants of color but not as much as I wanted, so once the dye was exhausted (completely absorbed so none was left in the water), I pulled out my skein, put it into a pan and started "hand painting" splotches.  I just used a spoon and the leftover fuschia/brown dye mix. to get some really dark, distinct areas of pink.  (Yet another fancy term -"hand painting" sounds so much better than "dropping dye onto the yarn with a spoon, brush or squirt bottle.")

Jennifer didn't do the dark pink splotches on hers, but she did leave her skein in the pot and add some straight brown to it.  Here is a picture of our two skeins hanging from the knobs on her grill to dry.  Hers is the longer skein on the left with the muted brown.  Mine is the darker pink on the right.  Jen's reminded me of a colorway by Knit Picks called "Frosting" which is pink, brown, and cream, but without the cream color.

One skein down, two to go!  Next we decided to do something with an Autumn feel to it, since summer is over and winter is rapidly approaching.  I'm cold and grumpy just thinking about it.  Anyway....

Jennifer had a great color called Aztec Gold that she hadn't tried yet.  I was game, so into the pot went our yarn with the gold dye!  Mmm... spaghetti...

After we kettle-dyed the gold to a really pretty deep gold-orange color, I took mine out and decided to give it a little variation.  Jennifer put the rest of the fuchsia/brown dye into a squirt bottle for me and added some water to dilute it.  The I proceeded to just dribble it around on patches of my yarn.  I went for a more subtle effect than with the first skein.

Jennifer hand-painted her yarn after the initial gold dye with distinct sections of purple, red, and a darker orange.  She told me that she has since overdyed it so I have no idea what hers ended up looking like.  I can't wait to see once she knits it up into something.

For third and final skein, Jennifer went way purple on hers with a little gray mixed in to mute it.  It actually gave it a bit more of a periwinkle look than the royal purple it started out as.  I'm not a huge fan of purple, but her resulting color didn't annoy me.

For mine, I went with a gray and decided that since we had purple mixed up, I'd add some faint streaks of lavender through it.  So I kettle dyed my yarn with the gray dye, but had to mix up some black and add it to get it dark enough.  I actually had someone on the yarn dyeing forum on Ravelry comment that I got a good gray, so I guess we did okay getting a medium gray!  Then I tried the squirt bottle technique with very diluted purple.  I also went with more distinct stripes around the perimeter of the yarn rather than random splotches.  Looking back, I should have added a little black or gray to the purple to mute it because it still turned out more purple than I wanted.  I think it's pretty - if you like purple.  (Which means my 7-year old daughter loves it.)  Here it is in the tray after the purple was added.  The camera really shows the purple - it did not look that bright/distinct in person.

Dyeing was done!  We hung everything to dry outside while we cleaned up.  Here's a nice picture of all six of our skeins hanging of Jennifer's deck railing.  Mine are the three on the left which means that hers are (obviously) the three on the right.

Here is a close-up of my three:

Once I got them home (in plastic bags), I hung them from the door frame over the washer & dryer until they were completely dry the next day.  I was tempted to try to reskein them because all of the dipping and swishing in the dye pot made them a bit unruly, but luckily realized that I would have spent hours (and probably a bit of cursing) to do it.  Instead, I twisted them into hanks, and I think they look pretty good even though they are a bit messy.

So I give you the final results of my dyeing day, in hank form!

There are just two things left to figure out.  First, what shall I name the colorways?  (Post comments if you have any good ideas!)  And second...

What should I knit with them???