Playing with Yarn Dye
I’ve wanted to play with dyeing yarn for a while. And after moving I decided to get myself some new crafty toys to try out. I have gotten acid dyes and metal stamping tools. I haven’t started stamping things yet but yesterday I decided to dye up some yarn.
I had a 2ply skein of Cormo I had gotten at Gauge+Tension, ages ago, in theory as a neutral for another skein. But it was perfect for this project. I ordered some Acid dye off Amazon, because Prime is a dangerous thing, it arrived right before my apartment warming on Saturday. I chose to go with citric acid, mostly because I don’t really like the smell of vinegar.
So I got my yarn soaked, poured in my dyes and waited. The method I used was Space dyeing from a skill share class by @alexcreates on instagram. I had seem his yarn at Vogue Knitting Live and I thought his class would be a good place to start.
Once the dye bath was mostly exhausted (i’m glad everyone mentioned how much red bleeds, I would have been pretty worried otherwise) I rinsed the yarn in wool wash a few times until the water ran clear.
I hang it up to dry in the bathroom. And hooray for summer it was already dry when I went to shower this morning. So I have my first finished skein of hand dyed yarn. While there are a couple things I would fix, like I think I needed to let the yarn soak longer before I added dye, I really like how my first draft of ‘a kid from Brooklyn’ turned out.
I have a couple of ounces of un-dyed fiber I will also be looking into dyeing, but I have to decide on the process for that first, as I’m much more concerned about felting, with fiber. I tried to not agitate the wool too much. Something to look into but yay dyed yarn!
Side note! The shop is open and there will be an update this Saturday at 10! Zombies, Witches, Founding Fathers, and Time Lords to name a few.