How To: Dye Your Own Yarn With Household Products
Last week I took a leap of faith and dyed my own yarn! A while ago, I won a bunch of gorgeous, gorgeous yarn from a yarn giveaway (shoutout to Expression Fiber Arts!). In that 10-lb bag of happiness was one cake of DK-weight yarn in color "Ivory" - it's the little round one on the table in the picture.
What better way to get into yarn dying than with a risk-free yarn that would (hopefully) turn out to be a luxury, hand-dyed item? So I turned to Google to read countless posts about how to dye your own yarn in order to prepare myself. Here, I regurgitate that process so you, too, can dye your own yarn! You can even over-dye old yarn - just make sure you know how color works so you don't end up with something a little bit horrible.
INGREDIENTS
yarn (natural fibers)
food dye or Kool-Aid
white vinegar
a pot
water
latex gloves (optional, depends on whether you care about food dye fingers)
STEP 1
Wind your yarn into a cake or hank. I chose cake, because 1) it was already in cake form, and 2) I thought I might try making a cool gradient, since the dye won't penetrate all the way to the center of a cake. Remember not to agitate your yarn too much throughout the process, especially if your yarn isn't superwash - you don't want it to felt.
STEP 2
Make a water/vinegar mixture in your pot (required) and soak your yarn in it until saturated (optional, depends on how you want your finished product to look; wet yarn takes dye more evenly than dry yarn). You should use roughly 1/4 c. vinegar for a quart of water. In the meantime, get your dye ready! I had McCormick Neon! Food Color and Egg Dye in my cupboard, and the chart on the back gave me some options. I tried out the "Cobalt" option (10 drops blue, 2 drops green, 1 drop purple) with one extra drop of green for a slightly more teal outcome. You can add the dye directly to the pot or mix it up in a little glass. You can also do this with Kool-Aid, though you don't need the vinegar.
STEP 3
I'm going to tell you what I did - feel free to add multiple colors right on top of your yarn if you want, to get a neat variegated colorway. I removed my yarn from the pot, added the food coloring, mixed it so the color was well-distributed, and plopped my yarn right back into the pot.
STEP 4
Bring your pot to a gentle simmer and keep it there until the dye is exhausted. This means that, when you look at the actual water in the pot, it's clear (or nearly so). Turn off your stove and let the pot, water, and yarn cool.
STEP 5
Rinse your yarn in cool water and leave to dry! For normal people, this would be the last step. However, at this point my yarn looked like this:
It's pretty cool, but the dye had only penetrated the first few layers of yarn in my cake. I could have stopped here, but I didn't want three-quarters of my yarn to be a vaguely speckled white, so I repeated the process.
STEP 6
Repeat because you're a crazy person. You can use the same water/vinegar mix you had before or make a new one. I wound my yarn into a hank and tied it up with bits of string in a figure-8 pattern to keep it from falling apart. This time I used exactly what the food dye box said for "Cobalt", because I thought it might be neat for the yarn to be subtly different all the way through. Lo and behold, it turned out pretty great:
Pretty neat, eh? It's now a subtly varying robin's egg blue, and I've now definitely caught the yarn dying bug. It's super duper neat! Go forth and dye, dear readers!
And as a bonus, here's a peek at my first attempt at knitting something, using sock yarn from my new stash!
What better way to get into yarn dying than with a risk-free yarn that would (hopefully) turn out to be a luxury, hand-dyed item? So I turned to Google to read countless posts about how to dye your own yarn in order to prepare myself. Here, I regurgitate that process so you, too, can dye your own yarn! You can even over-dye old yarn - just make sure you know how color works so you don't end up with something a little bit horrible.
INGREDIENTS
yarn (natural fibers)
food dye or Kool-Aid
white vinegar
a pot
water
latex gloves (optional, depends on whether you care about food dye fingers)
STEP 1
Wind your yarn into a cake or hank. I chose cake, because 1) it was already in cake form, and 2) I thought I might try making a cool gradient, since the dye won't penetrate all the way to the center of a cake. Remember not to agitate your yarn too much throughout the process, especially if your yarn isn't superwash - you don't want it to felt.
STEP 2
Make a water/vinegar mixture in your pot (required) and soak your yarn in it until saturated (optional, depends on how you want your finished product to look; wet yarn takes dye more evenly than dry yarn). You should use roughly 1/4 c. vinegar for a quart of water. In the meantime, get your dye ready! I had McCormick Neon! Food Color and Egg Dye in my cupboard, and the chart on the back gave me some options. I tried out the "Cobalt" option (10 drops blue, 2 drops green, 1 drop purple) with one extra drop of green for a slightly more teal outcome. You can add the dye directly to the pot or mix it up in a little glass. You can also do this with Kool-Aid, though you don't need the vinegar.
STEP 3
I'm going to tell you what I did - feel free to add multiple colors right on top of your yarn if you want, to get a neat variegated colorway. I removed my yarn from the pot, added the food coloring, mixed it so the color was well-distributed, and plopped my yarn right back into the pot.
STEP 4
Bring your pot to a gentle simmer and keep it there until the dye is exhausted. This means that, when you look at the actual water in the pot, it's clear (or nearly so). Turn off your stove and let the pot, water, and yarn cool.
STEP 5
Rinse your yarn in cool water and leave to dry! For normal people, this would be the last step. However, at this point my yarn looked like this:
It's pretty cool, but the dye had only penetrated the first few layers of yarn in my cake. I could have stopped here, but I didn't want three-quarters of my yarn to be a vaguely speckled white, so I repeated the process.
STEP 6
Repeat because you're a crazy person. You can use the same water/vinegar mix you had before or make a new one. I wound my yarn into a hank and tied it up with bits of string in a figure-8 pattern to keep it from falling apart. This time I used exactly what the food dye box said for "Cobalt", because I thought it might be neat for the yarn to be subtly different all the way through. Lo and behold, it turned out pretty great:
Pretty neat, eh? It's now a subtly varying robin's egg blue, and I've now definitely caught the yarn dying bug. It's super duper neat! Go forth and dye, dear readers!
And as a bonus, here's a peek at my first attempt at knitting something, using sock yarn from my new stash!
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