Adventures in Dyeing

Michael and I made the trek out to AC Moore's yesterday and got all manner of cool stuff. We also had to battle the rain, 20+ degree sidewalk banking, and idiots who park their cars in front of the ramps ot the corners, but that's a rant for another post.

I decided I was going to try and make self-striping yarn. The soaker pattern that I've been working on for him has 102 stitches in the body, so I knit up a swatch of 100 stitches with a generous tail at both ends and measured it - wouldn't you know it's about 100" long, something I probably could have found out pretty easily on-line or in one of my many knitting books in a matter of seconds, but I like to do things the hard way as you will find out (or as my friends/family are all too aware of). First, lets look at some pictures!

This is the yarn as I took it down this morning.


Here's a skein that I made up so I could see what it looked like. There is something really cool about having a skein of yarn that you made yourself.


Here's the swatch I knitted up so I could see how the stripes worked.

Now onto the things I should know better about...

I bought five colors of Wilton paste food coloring and decided that I would use all five in my yarn - if you are going to make something, you may as well go all out. I knew that it took 100" of yarn to make one stripe, so rather than arange several chairs thoughout my living room, I decided to make a board with a series of pegs on it that I could wrap the yarn around and eliminate the need to rearrange furniture.
This seemed like a really good idea at the time and I got to use my Dremel to drill the holes for the dowels, which is always a plus. After a bit of thinking, I came up with a way to wrap the yarn so I could get the five sections I needed for each color and the length necessary so I could have some stripes be narrow and others wide. After a few false starts I got the entire skein of wool (8 oz.) onto the board. I hit my first snag when I tried to remove it - there was overlap in places and on one set of pegs I wrapped a few too many times on a couple of rounds so I ended up with a tangled mess. No worries, it would all come out in the end.

Next I mixed my dye. The only other time I've done multiple colors, I hand-painted it onto the yarn. This time I decided I would start out with a bowl for each color and then transfer it to ziplock baks so I could set the dye in the microwave. First off, Wilton paste food coloring is super concentrated, so you can get that dark, bright color in your icing without diluting it. With the red yarn I made a few weeks ago, I used about 4 oz. of yarn and 1/2 oz of food coloring. It took many, many rinsings to get out all of the excess dye. Not remembering this, I again used 1/2 oz. of food coloring for each section (weighing between 1-2 oz each). I gave up trying to rinse it all out after 40 minutes, and dye is still coming off, my hands are a lovely shade of magenta after knitting the swatch. I'm thinking of doing some more yarn in the green color later this week (~ 4 oz.), so I'm going to try using only 1/4 oz. of food coloring and see how that goes.

In my zeal, I forgot a very important thing - yarn too has volume. I had my dye mixed in 5 over-sized coffee cups, filled to within 1/2" of the top. Then I added the yarn in each cup. By the time I got to the third cup, dye was already starting to leak out of the first one, onto the cutting board I was using to balance everything on, then onto my stovetop, and down the front of my stove until it hit the rag-rug on the floor. Here's my amazing, technicolor cutting board:

I also need to remember to wear gloves - I've washed my hands so many times (twice with toothpaste) and it still looks like I just got off my shift in the abetoire. I also seem to have forgotten everything I learned about color theory, because the blue and the purple really have no place with the green, gold and copper colors.

Despite all of this, the yarn does look super cool and the depth of color is amazing. The paste coloring fights being disolved in liquid, so you end up with these incredible gradations of the component colors. Hopefully the next time I do this, things will go a bit more smoothly.