Adventures in dyeing

[bouteillebleu]

This is based on several articles I've read about dyeing wool-based yarns, and is an Experiment! to see what I can do.

Here is the yarn I started with:



This is Gothic Yarns superwash sock, in the colourway Babbling Brook. It looks really nice in the skein, but experiments with knitting a sock from it suggest that it pools very obviously due to the white parts contrasting very strongly with the blue parts.

Now, I like the blue, but I'm not so fond of the pooling, and it's likely to be hard to find a pattern I want to use this colourway for. What to do? Dye it!

Here is what we are dyeing this in:



That's my wok. It's the only pot large enough that I own and we have a replacement for in case it ends up ridiculous colours - I thought it might be a bit rude to use the rice cooker, plus the rice cooker's non-stick coating is coming off in places. The wok is fine, and can be heated on the hob to set the yarn.

So, to start with I filled the wok with warm water, and added a couple of slugs of vinegar. Then I added the yarn to the water - upon which it pretty much floated - and pushed it under and squeezed to get some of the air out so that the yarn would take the acid. Here's how it started out looking:



(The red bits are remnants from another skein of Gothic Yarns sock yarn that I used for Sock Wars.)

The yarn was left like this, to take up the vinegar, for about half an hour.

Next I mixed up the dye - this was Supercook food colouring, in red and blue. Mixed these up in 400ml warm water until I had a colour I liked, added another slug of vinegar. (This doesn't photograph too well, unfortunately.)



Took the yarn out of the wok and put it into a bowl while I poured out about 400ml of the water there and added in the dye, then put the yarn back.



Turned the heat on under the wok, let it simmer for a while. The first lot of dye wasn't very strong and it didn't absorb it much - I had a faint purple on the white bits of the yarn, but not much more. So, to follow up, I added some more dye - mostly red with the remains of the bottle of blue, that looked blood-coloured in the jug.



The yarn's taken this up a lot better. Took the wok off the heat when it started steaming, put a baking tray over it (the closest I have to a lid) and put it at the back of the hobs for half an hour to allow the heat to set the dye. (If this doesn't, no worries; enough should set to make the yarn colour a better knit. I just have to bear in mind that dye may come off while knitting or in the first wash.)

After half an hour, the yarn is going a deep burgundy colour with variegation. (Unfortunately the picture below isn't fantastic.) Put it in for another twenty minutes.



When I had another look at it then, the water was pretty much clear (a little red left at the bottom, but that's all). Rinsed it out thoroughly in water slightly cooler than what it was cooking in.



Most of the skein is burgundy with very subtle variegation where it's over either blue or white in the original, but there are some places where the dye didn't get all the way through to the centre of the skein. These still look pretty awesome.



The yarn is now drying in my shower. Will take pictures when it's properly dry, which will be in a few days.

Comments

[lupie-stardust.livejournal.com]

I can't wait to see what this looks like dry :D