Friday, September 12, 2008

Dyeing for Friday

Hmm...seems to be a very lame day of the week thing going on around here! Struck my funny bone. I recently bought some Wilton's frosting gels (or whatever they're properly called) to experiment with dyeing. It just so happened that I had two skeins of cream lace weight in the bin. I decided that I wanted teal and set to playing. I first put the skeins in the microwave with teal Wilton's. But it didn't come out quite right. Instead of a solid teal, I had white parts. And Wilton's dyes are known to separate, so I had some green starting to show. Made up more teal dye, spread the skeins around in the crock pot and checked on it about two hours later. And while there wasn't any more white, I was getting green areas. So I mixed up some royal blue and poured that in. But I didn't take the yarn out first, I just poured in the new dye. It was amazing to watch the yarn suck up the royal blue! I ended up with purple areas! And while I don't have two identical skeins, I am happy with how they turned out. But if I need more than 350 yards, I'll have to alternate skeins.

This is the dry yarn prior to reskeining. The purple blotches are really noticable!



But this is the yarn wound into skeins. The subtle variations really don't show in the picture. And I really like the yarn!



This didn't turn out how I expected....but I sure will be trying this again!

1 comment:

Alwen said...

They look like they will be pretty knitted up!