A Dip into Dyeing

I plan on doing a lot of posts on dyeing. I love it. There are plenty of different ways, styles, colour choices and yarns so its an exciting new endeavour for me.

I will show you a couple of my first attempts here, and in a few days, explain properly with step by step pics, how I did it.

My first dyeing experience was with a bulky natural wool. Having dyed a few different ways now, I am glad that I started with a bulky wool. Very glad! I am confident enough now that I will happily (and often) dye a fingering weight yarn, and would be willing to try a lace weight yarn, but for my first attempt, it helped immensley.

What I had was about 100g of yarn. I used our slow cooker for it and it worked well. Great for my first try, because there wasn't much that could go wrong.

I dyed first with an electric blue, then overdyed with a saturated green. (DS helped me pick the colours). It has some tonal variegations in the colours too.

Unfortunately, DS decided to help me re-skein it. Which ended up in a tangled mess. I managed to salvage it, but in 4 random-sized mini skeins.

Nest up, I have some Bella Baby Sugar in a Camel colourway, that I overdyed in foam cups on the bench.

I wound these into 8g mini skeins., dyed each one in it's own cup, heat set them in the microwave, then hung them to dry in our mini greenhouse on the deck (so they could dry overnight, and I wouldn't have to worry about rain). Then, the next morning, I hung them on the sunshade line on the deck to finish drying.

And last, but not least, I have dyed this merino in a nappy bucket.
I had 10x 50g skeins, and I picked purple to try. This one was over 3 days (2 nights) and was by far the longest of all 3. But it is very useful for a large amount of yarn. I heat set this in the microwave too.