Colour me blue

For the past week or so, I've been playing with yarn and acid dyes. I've never dyed yarn before, although I used to do fabric some years ago. After a few mishaps - honestly, skeining and ball-winding seemed to be a bigger problem than the actual dyeing process *ahem* - I managed to get results I'm happy with.

Now, here's the thing. As with many new things I want to try, I used the materials and tools I had on hand. Obviously I bought dyes (Jacquard), but other than that I adapted the process to my conditions, instead of the other way around. So, here's what I had: silk and angora blends (laceweight), glass baking pans, not a lot of time to watch the stuff simmer.

Thus ...

It's why I like casseroles. Throw everything in, put in oven, set timer, forget about it for 40 minutes. So one might call this the casserole approach to dyeing yarn. First I dyed skeined yarn, but then I thought that leaving it in balls might give a nice effect. It did, but the tricky part was getting the damp balls into skeins to dry.

Since I had only silk and angora blends, I knew that there would be a candy cane effect in the finished product, and it took a while to figure out how to use that, but here's one of the results ...

The yarn (two strands of silk blend one strand of angora) is very soft and fluffy, and the colours (dyed in two dye baths, bluer/black and lavender, once as center-pull balls, once as skeins) are just beautiful. The undyed rayon plies actually enhance the light sheen of this yarn.

I'm going to have to take a raincheck on the other yarns, because it was already dark when I remembered that I wanted to take pictures of them. All in all, it was great to play with all the colours - a great mood lifter in dreary weather, I can recommend it - and I can't wait for my budget to allow for different yarns and fibers and some other stuff. When I think about learning to spin soon and imagine that I can dye, spin and knit my very own yarn in addition to drooling over other people's blogs ... happy.