First dyeing experiment!!

Bare
Originally uploaded by diluvienne.

I have always been intrigued and fascinated by the fact you can easily and inexpensively dye your own yarn and make wonderful color-ways. I had to try!

I wanted to use only "natural" pigments and then so many ideas came in that I had to buy 10 skeins of bare merino wool. I figured that this would be a great starter, some material for experimentation. Eventually, I'll know what I do and I'll dye yarn, aiming for a given result.

Natural was a big argument for me and I was very stimulated by the idea that you can do powerful coloring and very creative dyeing/knitting with ingredients found at the grocery store. I have been thinking that there is so much food that stains clothes when we don't want, I might as well use that as a dye for yarn!

Expérimentation en cours
Originally uploaded by diluvienne.

I followed the procedure detailed by Knit Picks. For my first experiment, I wanted to make a 3 stripes of blue: light, medium, dark. I tried to play with the solutions, seeing what it would do.

Basically, I washed the yarn gently with a bit of Zero detergent. and rinsed afterwards. Then, I prepared my three dyeing solutions:

- Light: Gatorade Frost (powder)
- Medium: Gatorade All Stars Blue Rush (bottles)
- Dark: Gatorade Frost + a hint of grape Kool-Aid

I dipped the yarn in glass containers and zapped it in microwave for 2 min. Then, I waited for a few minutes and zapped again for 2 min. Again and again. When I noticed that the yarn picked all the pigments, I would change the solution with new pigments.

From 3 to 2
Originally uploaded by diluvienne.

I noticed a little problem with this method when it came to start the actual dyeing. The color doesn't reach the "in-between" the pots... That means that between the colors, there would be no color. At some point, when the yarn looked rather well coloured, I decided to dump the "in-betweens" inside the 2 darker solution, in order to stain them as well. I guess that this maneuver is responsible for the fact that I ended with mostly 2 colors instead of 3. But I am very happy with the way it turned out!

Drying
Originally uploaded by diluvienne.

After many many cycles of heating, resting and not solutions left, I let it cool down for 2 hours (the time to watch a movie, in fact!) and when I came back, the liquid left was like water! The yarn really drank all the pigments there was! I transformed Gatorade into water!

I rinsed the skein, washed it gently with Zero again and placed it on an old towel for drying.

There it was, "Blue Frost" was born. :-)

Blue frost
Originally uploaded by diluvienne.

From this experiment, I found out very quickly that it doesn't matter what colour you make, you need to provide intense dyeing solutions to feed pigments to the yarn and ensure a strong colour or else you need a lot of liquid so you can refresh it as the pigment go into the yarn.

But who cares? We talk about juices you can find at the grocery store, not some expensive fancy dyes! And, dyeing with food is really fun and I appreciate the fact that it is 100% safe. Hell, I can drink the stuff, I can safely say that wearing it won't be harmful! I gotta say that this experiment pleased and thrilled the scientific and creative side in me. Them happy, together at last!

More food experiment to come! I have many more ideas and skeins to work with!!!! Woohoo!! Joy!