A couple of weeks ago I bought 10 jars of Jaquard Acid dye at Pearl Paint. I’ve been saving up 1 L soda bottles to make dye stock. So yesterday while it rained I got dyeing. I only had 6 bottles so I had to pick which colors made the cut. While I was planning on dyeing other stuff my main goal was to do my dyeorama yarn. So those colors got dyestock priority.

Once I had all my dyestocks made and my fiber soaking it was time to get ready to dye. I had 2 skeins of sock yarn. I had been planning to paint them, but I’ve been reading the Twisted Sister Sock book and I’m intrigued by kettle (hot) dyeing. So I decided to give it a whirl. First up I dyed some purple and bright green to get the feel for it. Then I got working on the dyeorama yarn.

The olive I got is very brown so I mixed it with kelly green to get real olive color. Then I picked out chartreuse, gun metal (dark blue) and sky blue. Kettle dyeing seems very “artistic” to me. You can dribble here, squish there, pour here to get very interesting results. Painting yarn is effective, but seems rather mathmatical to me. I need to be a little more patient in my hot dyeing, since I forget to let one dye exhause before I add another. Although that probably makes some interesting effects.

dyeorama yarn


Anyway, I love the way it came out. The color bands are very small, so I was quite interested to see how it knit up. Since certain colors are used more overall, it should have the same effect as larger bands from a distance, but be more varied close up.

I finally got good brown dye so that was a theme for my wool dyeing. I did some brown and blue, and some brown and turquoise. I dyed some tinkle and some wool brown to card together later. This was all on the stove. Then I had 8oz of roving that won’t fit on my stove, so I sort of splattered it with pink and orange and microwave steamed it. Then I dyed some firestar orange for carding. Note to self: get a big roaster pan for dyeing.

All of that dyeing took 3-4 hours and made my back ache. But now I’ve got lots to play with! You can check them out on flickr. They are all the most recent photos.