Dye Day! And the pretty results!

Back at Stitches in February, Sarah invested in a set of dye powders.  Not just Kool Aid Dyeing for us - we're going high tech!  The colors you can get are different too.  Kool Aid gives you a lovely range of brights - every neon color under the sun - but the dye powders include black and brown and navy.  You can get richer colors from the powders.  Different effects too.  Talking with the girl from Creatively Dyed Yarn at Stitches, she gets a cool speckled effect on the yarn by using the straight powder to dye, dusting the yarn so to speak, not mixing it up as a liquid first.  Something to try in the future!  We'll start with the basics first, though :)

Proper precautions first!  The dye powder irritates lungs, so you have to handle it with mouth/nose covered.  Dyeing banditos are we!

The dyes we were using the basic rainbow, plus brown and black.  Some of the colors' names were creative, though.  For example, we have no idea what "working purple" is :)  Below, you see them in the powder case, and all mixed up, ready to go!

 

We also had to take some other precautions, lest we had unwanted helpers!  Sarah has 3 pups, and one especially wanted to be in the kitchen helping.  Her "pibble" is the sweetest dog EVER, and I would definitely run off with him if she wouldn't notice (Zach would help, too!  We both love this guy!)  He definitely wanted to help with the dyeing, though, so we had to set up a blockade.   It was so hard saying "No" to that face!  Her kitchen, though bigger than mine, isn't big enough for 2 full grown people, lots of yarn and roving, AND a 60 lb pit bull.  He watched us forlornly from the other side of the blockade.  Sorry, Buddha!

 

I had 5 skeins to dye, 3 lace/light sock weight and 2 bulky.  The lace weight yarns are possum!  Not opossum like in the States, as who would want to harvest hair from those mean little critters and would it even be worth the effort, but a New Zealand possum.  Pretty soft and warm, and it falls in with my interest in unusual fibers recently :)  The possum lace is in the bag on the counter (the picture below on the left) and the bulky yarn is the one hanging like spaghetti as I lay it out (the picture on the right).

Sara also had some pink yarns that she wanted to over-dye, so she decided to kettle-dye them with red.  Kettle-dyeing boils (simmers, really) the yarn in the dye.  You end up with relatively uniform yarn instead of stripes or blocks of color, but mottled all in the same color, based on which sections of yarn were most exposed to the dye.  As we were dyeing the week before Halloween, we laughed that the kettle-dyeing set-up looked very seasonally-appropriate with all the red liquid steaming with unknown things floating in it!

Two of the possum yarn skeins I decided to try and get W&M colors in (green and gold).  Didn't quite work, but I like the results nonetheless :)  After the first dye-day,  I dried the yarn to see what I had, and it wasn't quite what I wanted.  There were still bits of blue where the colors hadn't mixed properly, and there were still natural sections as well, since the possum yarn I started with was more natural than white.  So we decided to try and kettle dye it in yellow to even it out.  Didn't end up with blocks of yellow and green like I thought I'd get, but an all-over mottled grass green (below right).  Apparently the blue bled a little...  The resulting yarn is very bright and springtime-y.  I rather like it, actually.  Amazing how much you appreciate green after being in the desert a few years!

The last of the lightweight yarns I just played at painting.  This was pretty close to what I was aiming for, and I'm happy with the results with this one.  I was aiming for an autumn-y mix - browns, a little black for shadow, red, yellow, orange,  and an olive green that I mixed together myself.  The picture on the top is while it's still wet, and the other shots below are after it's dried.

The last of my yarns was a bulky weight, Lion Brand Kool Wool.  I picked up the two skeins on super-sale when the yarn was being discontinued.  Hadn't decided on a project yet, so decided to use them to dye!  It's a 50-50 wool-acrylic blend, so it won't take up the dye as strongly as a 100% wool (or other natural fiber) yarn, but it will take it up sufficiently.  I spooned and dribbled blue and cyan and purple dye on the yarn, so it was small color sections on the yarn, and painted the dyes back and forth with a paintbrush, to mottle them up a little more. 

We did have a second dye learning experience, though, besides the kettle dye yellow (...er, green).  We lost one skein of the bulky wool to the microwave when heat setting.  Oops :(  Zach stopped by as we were playing, and stood there asking "what's that smell?"  We'd been smelling the vinegar and dye all afternoon, and didn't notice the burning hair smell until we were standing right by the microwave, where it was rather noticeable.  All damage was to one skein only, though, so not too disastrous a learning experience!  Lesson learned:  make sure your yarn isn't too dry when heat-setting the dye; if it's more dry than not, burning results!


Still, though, we had a successful skein of the Kool Wool survive, so I still have enough for a small project - more on that later though :)