All Buttoned Up

This was set to be posted before some issues in my life have come up. I may not be posting as regularly as I was before. Eunny said it right - when it rains, it pours.

The other day, I had an idea to show how I dye yarn - being a college student and all. So what you say? I have no kitchen. No garage. Only a small dorm room and a public bathroom. Here’s how I do it.

Step 1. Get some natural yarn that you want to dye. Mine is Knitpicks Bare Merino Sock yarn. Make the skein bigger (this makes the dye easier to permeate each spot - and hopefully cuts down on pooling).

In the photo at right, you’ll see that I put my yarn on my swift and I’m winding it around 2 chairs in the middle of my room. It’s tight and I knock a few things over in this process, but I think it’s pretty important.

Step 2. Tie off the skein in lots of places. In this skein (about 8 feet in circumferance), I only tied the skein in 5 places - but you may want to do more. The way that I dye yarn has little movement or even room for movement -so I was pretty satisfied with the 5 places thing. But really, you should do what you intuitively think will work for you. Next, I like to make a chain a few loops long with my skein (think like my hand is a crochet loop) so that it’s not so long and crazy and it is less likely to dissolve into a knot. I learned this trick form a weaving class. If you have no idea what I mean when by this little trick than maybe tie the skein off in a few more places just to be safe.

Step 3. Soak the yarn in water. I use a giant mason jar of lukewarm water and a glug of vinegar/ Most dyeing-tutorials recommend that you add Dawn to the water because it makes the water “wetter,” and removes grease. Since I think water is wet enough already and the Knitpicks yarn always seems pretty clean to me - I don’t add Dawn to the mix. Intstead, I add some vinegar so that I’m already on the way to dying (vinegar sets the dye, by the way - you’ll have to add it at some point. I add it at 3 points along the way just to make sure).

Let the yarn soak for a while. If I’m impatient this means a few hours. If I’m busy and things are crazy in my life - this may be overnight. In this particular case, it was overnight.

Step 4. It’s action time. Pull out the yarn from the water and let it sit in a strainer so that it will drain lots of the liquid (but not too much). I put a microwavable casserole dish under this so that I could have an idea of how much water drained from my yarn and how much I should think about putting back in.

Hmmm. Let me explain this a bit more. Ok, so I pull out the yarn from the water and I hold it above the jar for a few moments while a lot of the water drains off. Then I let it sit in the strainer while I do some other stuff (getting ready to dye the yarn) so that more of the water drains off. In this case that amounted to about 3/4 of a cup of water. For the sake of making life easier, I rounded this to 1 cup. Remember that number - we’ll use it later.

Step 5. Prepare the surface. I layed out strips of cling wrap radiating out from the center (but not going across to the other side - there’s a whole in the middle as you see the squeeze bottle preserving). I recommend going brand name with the cling wrap - you don’t want melty plastic film adhering to your yarn. Similarly, be liberal with the wrap at this stage - you don’t want the surface under the wrap to be dyed - and you don’t want your yarn to turn to a soupy mess either.

Also, you want to make a pot of hot water at some point. I use my 10$ coffee maker (hotplates aren’t allowed in the dorms).

Step 6 - Prepare your dye solutions.

I only use acid dyes right now. Real ones, not drink mixes (no hate here - just a bad experience). This particular skein was dyed using Jaquard dyes. In each glass jar (old baby-food jars), I put 1/4 of a teaspoon of dye, a bit of vinegar and 1/3 cup of hot water. The colors I used were Vermillion, Pink, and Salmon (with 1/8 t vermillion added for fun). Mix the dyes.  - NOTE - 1/3 cup times the three dye pots equals the one cup of liquid that came out of the yarn in step 4.  This ensures that we have enough dye to go around without getting a dripping wet mess either (or wasting dye).

The brown spray bottle in this photo is filled with vinegar for acidizing-part-3 (I told you I go a bit crazy with the vin).

Next up - Layout the skein (I’m only doing one skein here.  But doing more than one is totally possible depending on your table size). Try to have as few twists and folds as possible. This makes it easier to tell if the dye has fully saturated the part that your dying. This is also a benefit of making the skein longer and skinnier. Also at this time it is a good idea to make sure that your yarn doesn’t come to close to the end of the table/your surface area. I ruined a good pair of pants when some dye when awry.

Step 7. This is the fun step. You get to paint your skein! I’ve used the pour method (not a lot of control here), the squirt bottle method (still not as much control as I wanted - also I had a tendency to use a LOT of dye and a LOT of liquid) and I’ve finally settled on using these sponge paintbrushes that I picked up at Michael’s for 20 for 1$.

Use all of one color before you move on to the next - this ensures that you use the right amount of dye and that you don’t accident try to make a purple darker by adding a green (they can both look black or very dark in color at this stage).

Oh, this is also a good point to tell you that you should be wearing gloves at this stage.

After you have all the dye where you want it (and, inevitably, some where you didn’t want it), spray the thing down with vinegar. This always makes my fingers hurt, I spray the yarn so much. In fact, look in this photo here - and you can even see the vinegar clinging to the yarn fibers. It’s like a morning dew on a spring morning.

Next up - Take each one of those sheets of cling wrap and fold it in making a giant doughnut. This is much easier if you start with the last sheet that you layed down (the one on top) and work your way around.

After you’ve wrapped up the doughnut, you should be able to tell where the cling wrap has less layers than at other areas. Reinforce with more cling wrap. You can see where I re-inforced in the bottom left corner of this photo.

Once your this far, scrunch it up by pushing it in toward the middle - try not to force some sections to go on top of others - you want the yarn to be as level and as low as possible (so the dye-liquid doesn’t drain to a lower spot and muddy it).

Put the scrunched yarn and cling wrap doughnut in a microwave safe container, again, being careful to keep the yarn level.

Step 8 - Heat it up.

There are different ways of doing this but this is how I do it.

First, 4 minutes of cook time. Then a rest.

4 more minutes of cook time. Another rest.

Finally 2 minutes of cook time.

Now let the yarn rest for a long time. A few hours would be ideal - a few minutes a little less than ideal. When your patience and excitement get the better of you, prepare to rinse.

I do this in the bathroom that 23 girls share. I’ve gotten some interesting looks. Anyway, I use a colander so that I don’t have to hold my yarn the whole time I’m rinsing (especially important if I was impatient and the yarn was still steaming) - and so that toothpaste doesn’t get added to the mix.

The photo above shows the yarn before I rinsed it and after I removed it from the plastic wrap (obviously).

Next up, rinse. If your yarn is hot, start rinsing with hot water (a dramatic temperature change could felt the yarn) and gradually get cooler. If your yarn is cool,use lukewarm water. Try not to move your yarn too much (no swishing) - just squeeze and turn the skein over, repeating until the water under the colander runs clear.

You can see at the left here how the colors will lighten quite dramatically in some cases. Don’t worry too much about light spots or places where it’s almost black. It’s called variegation. Hand-painting. Nothing’s perfect. And in knitted items, it’ll add character and depth.

Let the yarn dry for a while. How long is a while? Squeeze the skein really, really hard - if you feel moisture or any temperature difference, give it more time.

Then, re-skein the yarn into something more manageable. I put mine back over the chair backs and took my niddy noddy to make the yarn look like the beautiful skein you see above.

Admire your handiwork and forget any imperfections (while remembering them just enough to change the process next time.)

And that is how a college student dyes yarn.