While my parents were staying down here, Mummy and I took the opportunity to have another little dyeing day.

We mixed up a whole load of 1% stock solutions (5ml dye powder, 15ml citric acid, and filled up to 500ml with water) of the new colours of Jacquard acid dyes I had bought. 2 pint milk containers (properly labelled of course!) make great receptacles for stock solutions – and they pour quite well too.

You can see the stock solutions all lined up along the back of the worktop below.

We each dyed 4 skeins of yarn this time. It was surprisingly time consuming making up all the stock solutions, and by the time we got to the 4th skein we were both quite tired. I think you can tell that from how my last one came out!

We were both using yarns from H W Hammand again. I dyed 4 skeins of 4ply weight 80% superwash merino, 20% bamboo (a lovely feeling yarn – I am really looking forward to knitting with it). Mummy dyed 2 skeins of DK weight Bluefaced Leicester, and 2 skeins of aran weight, 80% alpaca, 20% silk.

Here is an action shot of Mummy dyeing one of her skeins of DK. She was so active that my camera has blurred her yarn-squashing hand 🙂

I’m afraid I have totally failed to take any photos of Mummy’s yarn once it was finished, so you will have to put up with just mine 🙂

First up, two skeins the same (or as close as I could get it). Here I was experimenting with diluting the dyes to get paler colours.

You may notice that these are a little less bright than colours I usually go for 🙂 This is going to be a Baby Surprise Jacket for a friend who is expecting. I am hoping that it is a good unisex colour and also a colour that hopefully both parents will like. I had better get a move on with the actual knitting!

Just in case you were concerned that I may have become subtle in my old age I bring you exhibit B:

This is going to be socks for me 🙂 I love how cheerful and happy this colour is.

One of the interesting things that happend while dyeing this yarn was that the emerald green dye separated a bit and the turquoise blobs in this yarn actually came from the green. Although I like it in this yarn I’m not sure I would always want that to happen. I was wondering whether I have got the acidity right – I’m sure I read somewhere about dyes separating when the conditions were too acidic. So I have bought some indicator papers and am going to make up a solution with 15ml of citric acid and 500ml of water (which is what I usually add my dye to – but if I tested the actual dye solution the colour would obscure the colour change of the indicator paper) and test out the pH. I am rather looking forward to this actually, somehow more fun than A-level chemistry ever was.

My last experiment wasn’t quite so successful. I hadn’t realised we would have time to dye a 4th skein, so while I had been having a think about the other colours for quite a while, the last one was a bit spur-of-the-moment. I was aiming for a kind of reddy brown, but it turned out that the red we had was on the pink side and the brown was a bit paler and greyer, and not as rich, as I had been expecting.

It isn’t a total disaster, but is not quite what I was after, and I’m not sure that the colour is very me. Luckily Mummy really likes it, so she is going to have it for Christmas (hooray – one down on the Christmas present decisions!).

It was fun using a slightly different base yarn, and the alpaca / silk that Mummy dyed was absolutely gorgeously squishy too. I like how the dyes have come out on the merino / bamboo better than how they did on the merino / tencel. I am looking forward to doing some more experimenting soon.

I have been doing some more experimenting with dyeing, and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet. I think this may well blossom into another fully-fledged addiction.

This time the yarn I have been dyeing is 50% superwash merino, 50% tencel, 4ply / fingering weight, again bought from H W Hammand. I also wanted to experiment with dyeing a greater quantity of yarn in one go.

So first of all, three 100g skeins dyed with Jacquard acid dyes, using citric acid.

Secondly another three skeins, using Jaquard acid dyes again, but this time using vinegar.

I cooked them both in a steamer I bought a few weeks ago specially for the dyeing. I was concerned that my microwave might not be heating the yarn evenly so thought I would give the steamer a go. Also the nice thing with the steamer is that it doesn’t require monitoring, it has a timer so I can just put it on and then go and do other things.

It was really interesting to see how the different fibre took the dye. The yarn is lovely and shiny but the colours aren’t as bright as on the 100% wool, and they seem to have a grey cast to them, particularly the teal. These are destined to be a couple of shawls, and I am really looking forward to seeing what this yarn is like to knit with.

After the excitement of the dyeing workshop with Jan, we couldn’t wait to get home and do some more experimenting. Since seeing the yarns Lisa from the Ash knitting group had dyed with food colouring I was very keen to have a go at that. Also I had some packets of Kool Aid picked up on a trip to America some years ago, and had bought some Jacquard acid dyes from Fibrecrafts which I was looking forward to playing with too.

We thought we would start with the least toxic and work upwards from there 🙂 Luckily when we replaced our microwave a few months ago I saved the old one (works fine, just a bit small and old, I bought it when I first went to university in 1995). So we could have a microwave dedicated to dyeing and not worry about cross contamination.

First off we soaked our yarns. I didn’t have any ammonium sulphate so we used white vinegar as a mild acid fixative. We soaked the yarn in water with a dash of washing up liquid, to remove any spinning oils and to act as a wetting agent, and a glug of vinegar for the acidity. As you can see this was a terribly precise experiment. The yarn we used this time was again blue faced leicester from H W Hammand, but this time the superwash sock weight. I tend to like to knit with finer yarns, and was interested to see how the superwash treated yarn would take up the dye. The yarn comes in 100g hanks, and we soaked two each, one for the food colouring and one for the acid dye, and soaked a hank each in plain water for the Kool Aid. The Kool Aid is already acidic so you don’t need to add extra acid.

While the yarns were soaking we mixed up the Supercook food colourings. Jan had given us a recipe of 1 tablespoon (15ml) of dye, to 2 tablespoons of water, and 1 teaspoon (5ml) of white vinegar. Using this ratio we mixed up two bottle of green food colouring, and one each of red, blue, and yellow. Each bottle contains about 3 tablespoons of liquid, so we mixed that with 6 tablespoons of water and 1 of vinegar. With the dyes all ready and waiting in disposable plastic cups, we laid out our cling film as before and arranged the damp yarn on top of it. One big advantage of this dyeing session was the opportunity it gave me to properly clean the kitchen worktops for possibly the first time since we moved in! We then covered the worktops with a folded out rubbish bag (to stop the dye dyeing the worktop) and a layer of newspaper (to mop up any spills) to create our workspace.

Happy dyer in action

Once we had finished painting we wrapped up our cling film parcels, put them in a nice cheap pyrex bowl bought for the purpose and nuked them in the microwave for about 2 minutes. Then let them rest for 2 minutes, followed by another 2 minutes nuking. On the second nuking the cling film parcel started to puff up showing that steam was being produced, but to be on the safe side we gave it another round of rest and heat. After the third cooking, a careful prod of the parcel showed that the liquid remaining was pretty much clear and that the dye had all be absorbed by the yarn. We left the yarn to cool down for a few hours, and went to mix the Kool Aid. Luckily the microwave is right next to the back door since the smell of boiling vinegar is quite pungent!

I picked up some of the Kool Aid several years ago on a trip to the states, and Paul brought me the rest back from a business trip. I was slightly worried when we first got it out (it had been lurking in one of my boxes of yarn for some years) that it might not work as the little packets had gone rather hard, but it turned out fine. After mixing up each of the sachets with a bit of water I was mystified as to why people would want to drink the stuff – the smell alone is really quite headache-inducing. I think the grape one is worst, reminds me of a kind of burnt plastic smell, not nice at all! Luckily we weren’t drinking it though, and after a few washes I am pretty sure the yarn wont smell any more.

We cooked the Kool Aid dyed yarn in the same way as before and then moved on to play with the Jacquard acid dyes. I had bought 5 colours of dye to get us started, in colours which I hoped would all go well together. Blue, purple, turquoise, teal and emerald green. While I was right that they did go well together and combinations of them created other colours which also co-ordinated well, the obvious difficulty we discovered was that without any yellow or red there were a lot of colours we couldn’t create. I have rectified this now by buying yet more dye, this is looking like being as addictive as the yarn buying 🙂

We made up 1% stock solutions in each of the five colours, 5ml of dye powder to 500ml of water. We were being a bit more scientific in our experimentation at this point, I have even bought an exercise book to use as a dyeing notebook and have been writing down what we did. We then mixed some of them together, and diluted some to create paler colours, and got painting! These skeins got the same cooking treatment as the others, and then we waited impatiently for them to cool down so we could rinse them and see how it had all come out.

Unfortunately I don’t have any good photos of the yarn in skeins, I think I was too eager to wind it into balls and start knitting. It really shows the contrast though of how a yarn looks in the skein versus in a ball, and again the finished knitting. I think the ball gives more of an idea of how the knitting will come out, the colours are more mixed up than they are in the skein. I have found this before with hand dyed yarn I have bought, that I love the yarn in the skein where there are big blocks of colour but these colours look quite different when they are chopped up into lots of little pieces in the knitting. That is not to say that they aren’t nice in the knitting, just that they can often be quite different.

So onto the finished yarn, all wound into balls (I do enjoy the ball winder). First the yarn dyed with the Supercook dyes.

I was so impatient with this one that I have started knitting socks already.

Then the Kool Aid, similar but a little different.

And finally the Jacquard dyed yarn.

I am very pleased with how they all came out, and the dyeing itself was such a lot of fun. I am looking forward to having another session. I want to try mixing colours a bit more, and also doing different shades of the same colour which would hopefully work with more textured patterns. There are more photos of my dyeing exploits so far here, and I am hoping to add to them soon!