A few years ago, a friend and I went on a mini-version of the I-75 yarn crawl. Part of the festivities were special discounts, sales and drawings to win things! I entered just because, and instantly forgot because I seem to rarely have good luck. About a week later, I received a phone call from one of the southern-most shops we visited, and the lady on the other end said I had won a prize drawing for 10 balls of Cascade 220 superwash, a pattern and a bag. Awesome, right?!
She got my address and shipped the whole thing to me since I wasn’t exactly local. I don’t remember seeing the prize out that day, but was a bit disappointed when I opened the box. It was periwinkle. 2200 yards of periwinkle.
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| This photo is from WEBS. If you are a person who can wear periwinkle, get your own here. |
Now, for some people, periwinkle is a lovely color they can wear. I am not one of those people. I am one of the people who put on periwinkle and instantly look like they are recovering from (or still suffering from or have succumbed to) an awful illness. I can’t wear even a little periwinkle next to my face, let alone an entire garment’s worth of periwinkle. What was I going to do with this?
My first thought was to try to destash it. Someone who liked and could wear periwinkle might want it. Locally, I took it in to destash night at my LYS and said make me an offer. No takers. Then I put it in destash on Rav. I got some hearts, but not even as much as one PM about buying it. In 2 years.
My second thought was that it could be overdyed. I wanted to avoid this if I could, because I had heard you can make a terrible mess of things and ruin the yarn if you don’t know what you’re doing. Felted yarn isn’t much good for anything except… felt. This was superwash, so felting wasn’t really an option, but it could get crunchy if I acid-burned it. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, it sat in my stash, in the bag, for a few years, moved houses, and generally took up space.
Fast-forward to last month. I had recently rearranged my stash and was tired of moving this yarn from place to place (both in my stash and geographically). Periodically, I’d gotten the idea to overdye this stuff and had never just gone for it. There are tons of great sites online with dyeing tutorials, but I kept coming back to DyeYourYarn.com . My last inclination was to Kool-aid dye it. Lots of people do it, and it seems to work really well. But then I realized it would take approximately $40 worth of Kool-aid to dye it all. Forget that!!
I reconsidered using food dyes instead of Kool-aid. They are also edible and generally safe to handle. They are also easily obtainable and probably have more color combinations available (as you can create your own with a drop of this or that). I already had citric acid in the cupboard, so that wasn’t a hurdle and it’s pretty easy to handle safely as well.
I realized that I had more than enough yarn to experiment with dyeing and still have plenty left over. I already had a crockpot, a food thermometer, citric acid and plenty of yarn. All I needed was some food dye and I had a 50% off coupon from Joann’s – it was time to just do this!
First step was sampling. I wound off 5 10 gram mini-skeins and secured them using crochet cotton ties.
After I prepped the yarn, I put it in the dye bath (water and citric acid) to soak and really get saturated. Meanwhile, I chose some colors to play with: Royal Blue, Teal, Violet, Burgundy and Pink.
Newb facepalm warning: Put on gloves when you open those little vials unless you wanna stain your fingers. Stupid foil lids!!
I put the yarn & dye bath into the crockpot on high to heat until it reached ~180 degrees. When it was close to temperature, I prepared my dye by diluting measured amounts in hot water.
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| Yes, those are wine glasses. Judge if you wanna… They pour better than the little glass dish on the right. |
Once the dye bath was at 180, I added each color of dye to a specific area of the pot. Everything I read indicated to let it cook at 180 until the water was clear.
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| Yeah, about the black crock… |
After a bit, I scooped some water up in a wine glass and when it was mostly clear, we called the first mission done. I unplugged the crockpot and let it cool overnight.
After a thorough rinsing, spinning out the excess water and drying, I had transformed periwinkle into this:
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| Clockwise: Teal, pink, burgundy, violet, royal blue, original |
ALL of which will look better on me than periwinkle!! The yarn wasn’t crunchy and it was fun to see how the colors pooled when they overlapped! I decided that blue and teal were my faves, so I did another test – with the remaining yarn from the ball shown on the top left.
I made careful notes of my dye proportions and scaled this up to half a skein. I loved it, so I was ready to do ALL of it!
I ended up with a second crockpot, with a WHITE crock – because I needed a bigger one to do two skeins at once AND because black isn’t helpful for seeing when the water is clear… I learned a few things about water ratios and how fast dye will strike if you don’t swirl it first… and I learned that a good washing after dyeing is necessary because food dye has a wee bit of sugar in it and can make your hands a bit sticky. haha
Now, I have over 1,300 yards of lovely blue/teal yarn that is dying to become a sweater next fall!
I’ve already knit a swatch and know it will become a Worsted Boxy by Jojo Locatelli.
While this was work & I definitely don’t see myself becoming a yarn dyer (wet yarn is heavy, y’all!), I enjoyed doing it and will absolutely be dyeing again in the future. In fact, I already have some yarn in mind… 🙂
Donita Westman 