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Stitch 'n Bitch Blog
Take this yarn and dye it!
Never dyed before? Here's a guide to creating your own handpainted yarn.
Ever had a desire to create your own variegated yarns? Mix exactly the colors you want on exactly the yarn you want, to create something uniquely your own? You’ve come to the right place. For years I thought it would be too messy, too complicated, and too expensive to dye my own yarns. I was wrong. What it is, is fun. With a potential for mess, sure, but it’s FUN! And did I mention, fairly inexpensive?
Below are three common ways to make handpainted yarns; I’ve arranged them in order of difficulty, though none of them are truly hard to do. The only real dangers are making a mess, felting the yarn (though that’s easily avoided by using superwash), or making something ugly. The yarn police won’t come after you for making ugly yarn. Come on, give it a try.
COMMON CONSIDERATIONS:
Regardless of what method you use, there are some factors to consider.
Safety: Using acid dyes developed specifically for dyeing protein fibers can be dangerous. It’s suggested you wear a filtration mask when handling the powder to avoid breathing it, avoid coming into contact with it, avoid breathing the fumes when you heat it to set the color, and you can’t use any utensils you use when dyeing for anything else. The dyes have to be special-ordered or purchased from hard-to-find retailers, and used in conjunction with other chemical additives that are just as difficult to find and often just as dangerous. Then there are the disposal issues for whatever you don’t use.
Organic, plant-based dyes aren’t much better; the plants themselves are often poisonous (pokeberry, anyone?), and the mordants can be insanely toxic –arsenic and copper sulfide are just a few of the more deadly chemicals you’ll play around with. I have a toddler, and the idea of having anything like that near her makes my blood run cold.
The answer? Food coloring. I know, I know. It all seems so grade-school to dye your wool with food coloring, and the colors are so candy-bright. But the safety considerations are just about nil (you could DRINK the stuff if you didn’t mind multi-colored innards) and you can use all your regular kitchen utensils to work with it. Candy colors can be avoided with overdyes, clever mixing, or careful regulation. Though I, for one, like bright colors. It’s one of the reasons I started doing this; most handpaint yarns are done in bleeding pastels or darks, which while nice, just aren’t my cup of tea.
To dye with food coloring (well, to dye with anything, really, but we’re sticking to food coloring), you need five things:
Yarn
FOOD COLORING AS A DYE ONLY WORKS ON PROTEIN/ANIMAL FIBERS. For beginners, superwash wool is your best bet. It’s unfeltable, easy to find, and affordable. If you’re looking for bright colors, get white (I have produced neon colors with neon food coloring on bright white yarn in the past). Cream is good for normal colors and pastels, light gray for pastels and neutrals. Cream is probably best for starting off with. In these tutorials, all yarn is Patons “Classic Wool” worsted weight, in color ‘winter white’. It’s not superwash, but it IS what I had on hand when I decided to dye some yarn for this article. Which is another great thing about dyeing your own yarn – you can transform what’s in your stash into something new. You can even, gasp, dye light yarns in solid colors with this method, but where’s the fun in that?
Colorant
In our case, food coloring. For most of my dyeing I use Wilton’s paste food coloring, but occasionally I will use McCormick’s liquid food coloring (the stuff with four colors in a box, with little dripper bottles). For each dye job, I specify which I used, but either one works. Both are available on line. Wilton’s can also be found at most craft stores that cater to cake decorators and candy makers, and McCormick’s is available in most grocery stores. Regardless of what you use, you want to dissolve it in boiling water before use, paste and dry or granulated colors in particular. If you can’t find the brand names mentioned here, get something else. They’re all made with the same dyes and chemicals, they just have different names. To preview the color, dab a bit of your dissolved color into a white paper towel.
Acid
In our case, vinegar. Safe, easily disposed of, and available at the grocery store in one gallon jugs if you want to buy in bulk. Acid opens up the fibers, chemically speaking, and makes the color stick. The more acid, the brighter the color, and the faster the dye ‘hits’, or takes up into the yarn. There also seems to be some funky reaction going on between the vinegar and food coloring; if you use more than ¾ cup/175ml vinegar at a time, it can make blues and purples take up red and blue at different speeds. The best way to avoid that is to soak the yarn in vinegar-water the night before and then add a small amount of vinegar to the dye pot, instead of just using a whopping dose with the dye. For each dye method, I specify how much vinegar went where. You are welcome to experiment, and do it your own way. There’s no wrong way to do this.
Water
Seems like a no-brainer, but depending on the chemicals and minerals dissolved in your water, your dyes won’t necessarily look the same as mine do. If you know there’s a lot of chlorine or iron in your water, you may want to consider using filtered, or picking up a couple gallons of spring water at the grocery store. I used tap water, but the water in my city is fairly clean.
Heat
You can get it from a crock-pot, a boiling pot of water on the stove, steam, the oven, or even your dishwasher, but you’ve got to get the yarn as close as possible to boiling without going over, for about fifteen minutes, to set the dye and make it colorfast. I used a crock-pot for two of these dye methods, but with careful heat management you could do the same thing on the stove with a large pot.
Notice you can buy all your supplies but the yarn at the grocery store? Yep. Safety is our middle name. (Well. Really our middle name is ‘cheap’, but we like safety too. Cheap and safe at the same time? Bliss.)
HOT POUR DYE METHOD:
This is the easiest and least-messy of the three dye methods; essentially you put your yarn in a crock pot and pour dye over it. There are some finicky details, but that’s really all there is to it. Keep in mind that the more dye you use, the more they mix together when poured into the pot. Ditto, the more colors you use, the more they mix. So for this method it’s best to use related colors (like blue/purple, or in this case, yellow/orange/pink) or colors that mix into something pleasant (blue/yellow/green). Avoid complimentary colors (blue/orange, red/green, yellow/purple) because they look like mud when they mix. Unless you want mud.
I skeined up the yarn on my niddy-noddy and soaked it overnight with ¾ cup/175ml vinegar mixed in, because I wanted the dye to stick to the yarn quickly when it was poured into the pot. (If you want yarn that is murkier with the colors more blended, don’t use any vinegar in the overnight soak.) In the morning I drained off the soak water (and with it, any vinegar left) and put it in the crock pot with enough water to cover and ½ cup/125ml vinegar. The amount of water to use in this case is tricky; the more water you use, the more the dye will spread when it is poured in later. You need enough water to cover the yarn, but after that, the amount is up to you. I put the crock-pot on high (with no dye yet) until I could see steam rising off the water; that took about two hours for my crock-pot. If you’ve got any meat or candy thermometers around, you can pop one of those into the crock-pot to monitor your progress (remember, all this stuff is food safe, so you aren’t destroying the thermometer OR the crock-pot).
While my yarn was heating, I mixed up some dyes. I put three drops of McCormick yellow in 1/3 cup/75ml water, and dissolved 1/16 teaspoon/.2ml of WiltonÕs paste food coloring, colors rose and creamy peach, each in their own ? cup/125ml boiling water. There were three colors, total; yellow, rose, and peach. I used liquid measuring pitchers, one for each color, to make them easy to pour later. (Paste food coloring HAS to be dissolved in boiling water, with a lot of stirring.) If you wanted to mix colors, this would be the time, when the colorants are dissolved in water. Add a little yellow to make a green pop, put some blue in the rose to make magenta, that kind of thing.
Once the yarn was hot, I poured in the dye; peach on one side, pink on the other, then blops of yellow in any empty spaces. I clapped on the lid and left it alone for an hour. When I came back, the dye pot had ‘exhausted’ (meaning the water was clear, and all the dye had stuck to the wool), so I turned off the crock-pot and let it cool for a couple hours, lid off. When the yarn was back to room temperature, I gave it a careful wash until the water ran clear, ran it through the spin cycle of my washing machine to get out any excess water, and then hung it up to dry.
You can see from the photo there were a good many places where dye didn’t reach the yarn. You can fix that by pouring in more dye, though that will lead to more color mixing. Or, you can wait until the dye pot exhausts, stir the yarn around, and pour in more color, leaving it to heat-set again before cooling and washing. If I’d been using superwash wool, I’d have done the stir-and-dye-more method, but I didn’t want to felt the yarn, so out it came with no stirring.
About the Author
Aija's glut of education is no match for her current occupation as full time playmate to the cutest toddler in the world. She is attempting fluency in the universal language (sock knitting, natch!) and blogs about it here. She maintains a small knitting accessory shop here as well.