Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Grand Dyeing Adventure - Part 1

To dye, as Peter Pan once said, will be an awfully big adventure.

Armed with little more than some spare yarn, a packet of food colouring and a few too many glasses of excellent merlot, I decided upon a new venture: dyeing my own yarns. You see, I bought about 8 balls of Cleckheaton's Angora Supreme off eBay, and when I saw them in the light of day I realised that the colour wasn't quite what I was after - as a purple, it's a little too much. Not the kind of colour that would look good all over, on a jumper or something. At first, I thought about trying to swap it on Ravelry for something better, and then I thought "screw it".

And then I read a few articles on dyeing with Kool-Aid (not really an option here in humble Austraila, although the results are excellent), and from there decided food colouring was the next step. I spent some time "researching", by which you can assume that I did a couple of Google searches and followed M around talking about it incessantly, using heretofore unused words such as 'mordant' (is that a verb, noun or gerund?) and talking rubbish about 'opening the fibres'. And then I got things underway. I have lots of yarn in my stash cupboard, but there's a lot of good stuff I don't use because it isn't quite...y'know...there. So now I want to change that: I have visions of fine russets, glowing scarlets, lush greens and mystic blues. How I expect to achieve this through the use of supermarket food colouring and white vinegar eludes me for the time being.

I have a few yarns ready for the first round of experimentation. They've been skeined, weighed, measured and had their meterage estimated through some really tricky maths, and I've got lovely before and after shots of the first round of dyeing.

Alas and gnash my teeth that my laptop cable is still on the fritz. No photos yet. Be brave, gentle readers. The time will surely be soon that I can show off my splendid yarny yearnings.

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