The Great Dyeing Adventure, Part 3

It's been a while since I touched on the Great Dyeing Adventure, and I don't quite feel like I got to wring all the juice out of that particular episode. Actually, this has been a string of episodes; a saga, if you will. To be honest, it's still going: right now, there's a big pot on the stove, with yarn cooling in it. Tomorrow I'll drain it and see what it has brought me.

The dyeing that we spoke of earlier, where I dyed Peach Twist and Cream Twist so that they came out a hideous zombie khaki. Remember that? Ugh. Yeah, we all remember that.

Well, the reason that all this dyeing came about was that I bought some Angora Supreme on eBay. I bid fiercely and won eight balls of purple, and five of white. The purple, when it arrived, turned out to be too...too, as the saying goes. It was too something, and I didn't want to wear it all over me as a sweater. The realisation that I had a buttload of yarns I didn't want to wear got me thinking, and I decided I would either have to swap it on ravelry (eh, too much hard work to get to the post office) or adjust the yarn to suit my taste. Here's a pic of the yarn, pre-dyeing.

My first goal was towards the blue spectrum: I thought I could deepen the purple and move it into the indigo spectrum through the judicious application of blue dye. So I skeined up two balls, and into the pot they went. Then, after a strangely lengthy conversation with M about the values of teal as a colour, I decided I would try to push some purple yarn in teal's direction, as well: into a pot of green dye, with just a little blue to bring it closer to the purple yarn. Here are the results, side by side:

Pretty, but still not quite there for me. I love rich, gem tones, not cookie-monster blue and vaguely-darker purple (the purpler one on the right is the 'teal' dye job -- yeah, I know, really green, huh?).

I then decided it was time for some hardcore dye. My Mum, a childcare worker (Hi Mum!) suggested Edicol, a heavily-concentrated food dye powder used by childcare staff to make playdough, paint, and other craft supplies. Completely non-toxic and damn near impossible to get out of your clothes. Seemed perfect. Thusly equipped, I thought about pushing the purple angora in the other direction, towards the red end of the spectrum. I used a full bottle of red dye, as well as a few generous spoonfuls of red Edicol powder. Et voila! Isn't it gorgeous? I urge you to click in order to embiggen the picutre, because there's a whole lot of awesome red/purple variegation that really tickles me. So cool.

Actually, I was so pleased with the intensity of the redness in this dye job, that I'm now redyeing the skeins that I had previously overdyed with blue. I think I should be able to push those blue skeins from spring blueish-purple to a full indigo, which will be very, very pretty indeed.

The Angora Supreme says 'hand wash' on the label, which means I've been very careful about not shocking the yarns when moving them between waters. Well, sort of. The first few skeins, I made sure the washing water, the soaking water, the dyeing water and the rinsing water were all about the same temperature. The next few, I was a bit more lax. The skeins cooling on the stovetop, er, may be felted: I actually forgot they were there, and they reached a pretty cheerful boil before I remembered. Still, I'll see how they look tomorrow. I'm letting them cool slowly, gently, overnight.

And if they come out the deep indigo that I'm praying for...well, I'll have a crack at overdyeing the other skeins, the ones I had planned to come out dark teal. If I can get a pretty, variegated, dark teal with undertones of purple, I'll be one very happy snail.*
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* Rule Number 84 of the Internet: Don't tell people the wistful hopes you have, especially when you know you'll have to blog about the outcomes later.

The Grand Dyeing Adventure: Part 3

What, you thought this was over? We have hardly brushed the surface! I don't know what seized me with such passion for changing the colours of things, but there we have it; it turns out there's a lot to document here.

So, when we last left our intrepid dyer (me) we had finished the first round of dye on Peach Twist. That's her on the left, before any of this began. A lengthy soak in green dye resulted in...what? Yes, you up the back: that's right, nothing! So, that left us (me) with the conclusion that what we were dyeing was not an animal fibre, but either a plant or man-made fibre. There's probably all sorts of complicated reasons as to why this fibres work differently with dyes, but I don't know what they are. I thought to myself, I thought: bethini my girl, you're going to need something a little more hardc0re for this stuff. A rendezvous later, and I had in my hot little hands some Dylon dye, in a muted forest green.

Perfect. So I got the dye pot out, grabbed a pair of disposable chopsticks for stirring, and set to work. Was Dylon always this fiddly? I don't remember having to dissolve shit separately and add salt and what-have-you. Oh well, let's persevere. Give it plenty of time - a few hours, really.

Dudes, you can totally tell where this is going already. I'm not even going to explain it all to you. It's so freaking ugly. Yep, that's it there on the right. A hideous combo of khaki and peach that I can barely stomach.

Wanna see a close up? Don't be deceived by the soft lighting in this pic, this is a seriously unattractive yarn. Take a moment to cast your eyes back up to the top of this post, and drink in the pleasant loveliness of Peach Twist before I started dickering about with dyes and gloves and mordants and whatever-the-hell-else is up with dyeing.

I just don't know what to do. It's so freaking ugly and I have three balls of it. If I could get my mitts on some hardc0re acid dyes, I'd give that a whirl. Seriously, I'm getting in way over my head here.

You'd think this would put me off dyeing, wouldn't it? I can't wait to do more. My mum has loads of catalogues from suppliers of craft stuff (she works in a childcare centre) and has promised to obtain me some Edicol, a thick, concenctrated food dye. I'm looking forward to getting my fingers dirty with that stuff, oooh yes. I'm thinking about trying to get hold of some white or cream superwash wool, and have a bash at striping, or even just mottling or variegating. I think I know how it's done. I think.

Meanwhile, what colour did I intend Peach Twist to be? Here's a shot of the skein ties I used, resting against the gentle background of some white Cascade 220. It's pretty, isn't it? Kind of like late spring in the heart of the forest or something. And then you see what Peach Twist became and think "well, I seriously screwed up right there".

Still, I don't think it's all my fault. Well, it is, but not like that. I mean, it's out of ignorance: the Peach in the Peach Twist is clearly not dye-taking-up, and if I had ball bands for any of it, I'd probably have been able to estimate how it was going to react to dyeing. But I just plunged straight in to see what would happen. It was a lot of fun, though. And one day, I'll set Peach Twist right.

The Great Dyeing Adventure, Part 2

Despite the sheer volume of cooking I undertook over the weekend, I hadn't forgotten my commitment to dyeing yarns!

I'm glad I've discovered the opportunity to dye with things like food colouring, because I think if I tried to use the hardc0re acid dyes, we'd just end up with bits of hand skin hanging off cupboards. I'm on the sloppy side, and don't put a lot of work into ensuring the workspace is completely cleared and sterile, etc. etc. Nor can I afford to buy a whole new range of dyeing-only crockpots, saucepans and implements. I've been doing all my dyeing so far in the huge stainless steel stock pot, over the gas cooker. Perfect!

So, here we go. Step one, procure the yarn you wish to dye. In my case, three skeins of Peach Twist and one of Cream Twist. These were remnant balls, handed to me in a job lot of leftovers when I first started knitting. They're quite nice, in a flecky way, but they're not the kind of colours I'm ever likely to wear. I skeined them on my niddy noddy, measured them and estimated how much I had of each. I made them little secure ties using some leftover sock wool -- colourfast, natural fibre, nice and loose, unlikely to felt. This stops the skeins tangling too much. Then I washed them, and soaked them in a pot full of water and white vinegar for a few hours. The idea behind this is to 'open' the fibres; the acid makes the yarn more responsive to sucking up colour. Or something. When using Kool-Aid to dye, which those lucky fruits in the US get to do, the citric acid in the Kool-Aid powder takes care of that.

After its wash and soak, Peach Twist (right) and her shy cousin Cream Twist (left) were ready to be dunked. I filled the stock pot with a few litres of water, making sure that the temperature of the water in the pot and the temperature of the yarn weren't too different -- after all, Peach and Cream Twist are mystery yarns, and I didn't want to risk felting them. Into the stock pot I liberallty squirted some green food dye, procured from the local exotic food emporium (Woolworths) and swirled it all around. I was clever enough to not use a wooden spoon for this, since the wood would stain to a pretty green and who needs that? After the dye was evenly distributed through the water, I grabbed Peach Twist (Cream could wait for now) and squinched out as much fluid as I could. Without twisting, of course, because what does that do, children? That's right, it breaks the wet fibres! Into the pot she sank, and I turned the heat on underneath (nice and low -- if the heat goes up too quickly, protein-based fibres tend to get a bit shirty and retaliate by felting) and wandered off.

I checked the pot regularly to make sure that it hadn't begun to boil, and when it started looking too hot, turned the heat off and left the lid on, so that the remaining heat would do the work. So exciting, this magical transformation; I imagined wussy old Peach Twist coming out verdant, lush, and altogether desirable. As you can see in the before photo, Peach Twist is so named because half the plies are peach-coloured, and the other half is cream-coloured. I imagined they'd take up the green dye differently, and I'd have a rich, varied green yarn on my hands. Yum.

After a few hours, I went back to gloat. Peach Twist hadn't done a thing.

The water was still dark green, and the dye simply hadn't taken. I huffed about, plunked the wet yarn into a strainer and gave it some squeezing to get the liquid out. After some sulky Googling, I decided I had found the problem! It's not an animal-based fibre! Of course. Apparently, the mild dyes in food colouring are really not strong enough for plant-based fibres, which Peach Twist clearly was. I smiled ruefully and chalked it up to experience. After all, the yarn was more or less the same as it was when it went in (except for a slight tinge of green through the cream part of the twist), so I would simply dry it out and try again with a proper clothes dye.

Here you can see Peach Twist drying, thinking about what colour she wants to be. You can also see the skein ties I used, which have enthusiastically adopted the colour I had in mind for Peach Twist.

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.