Dye Day

I had SOOOOO much fun today! I met up with one of my Knit Group buddies, Christy, to learn how to hand dye yarn. I thought it would be so much more personal to include this hand dyed (by me) yarn in my Secret Knit Pals box, than to just find something online to send her. Not to mention a fair bit cheaper doing the work myself. :o) So, we had lunch at Ruby Tuesdays (I love, Love, LOVE their mini burgers!) then we went over to her house and she taught me how to dye yarn! She has this great basement that's set up for dying and sewing and all sorts of other crafty things. It's so cool that she can have a little haven like that in her basement! I WANT ONE! :o)

We started off by picking which yarns we wanted to dye. I picked out a really great yarn that has a different kind of fiber in it that twists around the main yarn. When it's dyed, this extra bit picks up the color differently for a candy cane-ish stripe to finish....you'll see. And she picked out a couple of different yarn types to show me how each fiber and wash pick up colors differently.

Next step was to soak the yarn in preparation for the dyes. But while they were soaking, we got to think about all the wonderful color combinations we could make up. Then the yarn is rung out and placed on a plastic wrapped cookie sheet. (I don't have any pictures of this part because I got way too excited and totally forgot!) Anyway, you bunch up the yarn in different ways, (I did mine in a clover kind of shape) then pour on the dyes for each section and smoosh (yes, that's a technical term) it into the yarn until its soaked all the way through. From there, the yarn is sprayed with a bit of white vinegar to set the colors and wrapped up in the plastic wrap; then put in a steaming pot for about 20 minutes. While the yarn was steaming, Christy and I played some Mario Party, and totally unlocked a handful of new games for her!

(Notice all the great dye bottles Christy has at the sink!) When the yarn in the steam pot has cooled a bit, it is taken out and gently rinsed in the sink. You might not be able to see in the picture, but the dye doesn't color your hands at this point, so you don't need the gloves as we did during the dying process. You also have to be careful that you don't smoosh it around too much and too vigorously or else it might felt. After most of the dye is rinse, each hank gets to soak for a bit with some of its buddies.

Once we had our fill of video games, we finished it all off, with a quick spin in the washer to get rid of as much water with as little smooshing as possible, and then are hung out to dry. It's really hard to tell with this picture because of the greenish/yellowy background, but I was hoping that mine would end up with a deep red, a golden yellow, a pumpkiny orange, and a rich chocolate brown. It didn't exactly end up like that, but it still turned out gorgeous. If you look really closely at the picture, you can sort of see the candy cane-ish stripes inthe brown (like and dark striping.) I can't wait to see what sorts of sockies she makes out of them. I really will have to tell her to send a picture! :o)

So, again, I must give a huge shout out to Christy for letting me come over and teaching me how to do this. THANK YOU! THANK YOU!! I really can't wait to do it again with my IOU yarn! :o)