And you can dye too, for all I care.*

In Sunday’s post, we got our yarn ready for dyeing. Today we play with dye. We will be using two colors as the finished product will be a striped, felted purse. We are using Kool-Aid Lemon-Lime and Berry Blue as our dyes. So here is the process for dyeing yarn in your kitchen with the help of a preteen.

Step 1

The yarn must be thoroughly wetted so it will absorb the color.

To do this, soak the yarn in lukewarm water to which you have added a couple of drops of Dawn dish washing detergent (use the plain blue Dawn not the fancy shmancy kinds)

Step 2

While the yarn is soaking, it is time to mix your dye.

You will need one package of Kool-Aid per ounce of yarn. We used one extra package for good saturation. Each hank was approximately 4 ounces so we started with 5 packages of Kool-Aid. Mix the Kool-Aid with enough water to dissolve it but the ratio of water to dye is not critical.

Mix thoroughly.

You want the dye to completely dissolve in the water. Otherwise, you might have dark or oddly colored spots on your yarn.

Step 3

Pour the dye over the yarn.

Remove yarn from soaking water and place it in a microwave safe bowl. Pour the dye evenly over the yarn until the yarn is just covered by liquid. If you don’t have enough liquid in your dye solution, add a little water to bring up the volume.

Push down slightly on yarn to make sure that it is completely covered with dye solution and that there are no air pockets in the middle of the hank.

Step 4

Heat set the dye.

Heat on full power for two minutes. Allow yarn to cool for two minutes. Repeat the heating and cooling cycle until all the dye is absorbed and the water is clear.

Remove yarn from microwave and allow to cool. Don’t rush this step.

When yarn is cool, wash with mild detergent or no-rinse wool wash using water that is the same temperature as yarn. Rinse using water that is the same temperature. DO NOT temperature shock the wool unless you want felt at this point. I cannot over emphasize this point. It doesn’t take a lot of temperature variation to cause felting. Trust me on this. Ironically, if you actually want the wool to felt it doesn’t happen this easily.

Step 5

Drain the yarn and gently squeeze out the excess water. Hang yarn and it allow to air dry. There will be water dripping from the yarn as it dries so hang it outdoors, out of direct sunlight, or somewhere that the dripping water won’t hurt, like over the bathtub.

Step 6

Admire and enjoy your beautiful yarn.

Tabitha’s Tips

Or Lessons Learned the Hard Way

• Wear gloves. Or use a spoon.
  
  Hands and nails absorb dye really, really, really, really well – possibly as well as yarn.
• It is easier to get the dye off your hands than your nails.
  
  And blue-green nails have a rather unique other-worldy, Bride of Frankenstein sort of appearance.
• Pay attention to the dye absorption rates. If it seems that all the dye is gone from the water after the first heat cycle, you probably need more dye. We found that the green required more dye than the blue to get good saturation. We ended up using 2 packages of dye per ounce of yarn for the green.
• If you have to add additional dye, make sure that the liquid is the same temperature as your yarn. Don’t temperature shock your yarn.
• Have fun.

We know the secrets of the Fire Swamp. So whenever you feel like dyeing, come visit.*

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*The Princess Bride references. Can you tell we have watched it a few too many times lately? Just be glad the topic of this post wasn’t Mawwiage or Twoo Wuv.

Other Posts in this series.
…Prepare to Dye

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DragonPurls, along with some of her internet friends, is embarking on a dyeing, knitting, and felting adventure. She wants to knit a present for a friend of hers and we decided it might be fun to dye the yarn too. For the next several days/weeks I will be documenting our adventure together.

It started with the purchase of a huge skein of Fisherman’s wool from a Hobby Lobby sale. For the sake of safety, we are using food dyes for our wool. After extensive research, she settled on the colors Lemon-Lime and Berry Blue. Kool-aid and yarn purchased, the next task is dividing the skein and winding into a nice hank for dyeing.
Here is the beginning of the process.

Here we are a little further along, when we had to pause to remove a tangle.

Since I don’t have a yardage meter (a deficiency I intend to correct next time Hubs wants to go to Bass Pro Shop), I had to come up with another way to divide the 465 yard skein onto two relatively even hanks. I think DragonPurls and I came up with a clever way to handle the problem.

First, I measured the distance around the pegs on the swift that my dear, sweet husband made for me. By my calculation, the distance around was about 2 yards. By calculation, we realized that 115 rounds of the swift should be approximately half of the skein. With the help of a handy dandy row counter, we wound 115 rounds of yarn onto the swift. At this point the yarn was broken and the hank secured in a number of places to prevent tangling. We then wound the other half of the skein. Our guesstimation calculations worked pretty well because the skeins were pretty close to the same weight (based on observation since I also do not have a yarn scale).

So now we have two lovely cream colored hanks of yarn all ready for an afternoon of dyeing.