Look What I Did!

I hand-dyed yarn yesterday.

Oh it was awesome. So fun and easy.

And did I mention fun?

I've been wanting to try hand-dyeing yarn for quite some time, but only recently have I gotten up the nerve to actually do it.

I ordered some bare laceweight hanks (4!! of them) from Knitpicks last week. It was torture waiting until yesterday to actually try this process out.

This hank (all 880 yards of it - good lord, have you any idea how much yarn that is??) was done in a two-step process using Kool-Aid.

I dyed the first step with black cherry, grape, pink lemonade, and strawberry. While it was in the crock pot, I loved the colors - they looked so pretty mixing and blending together.













But after it had some time to dry I wasn't so crazy about the overall look. It was too ... I'm not sure. But I wasn't as thrilled as I wanted to be with it. I loved the black cherry and grape areas, but the strawberry completely took over the pink lemonade part (I thought it might - reds bleed a lot) and that whole area just didn't meld well with the more muted colors on the other end.

So back into the crock pot it went for session #2: Project Overdye. This time I used just grape and black cherry. The grape was poured liberally all over the yarn and the black cherry was put here and there in various places.

Rinse, hang to dry, and wait. This morning I went to take a look at it.


Immediately fell. in. love. The gorgeous muted purples, berries, and pinks I had originally wanted were there and so beautifully blended! Oh, happiness and joy!

I've got three more hanks of the bare laceweight to dye and one hank of a merino/silk blend that I'm really excited about. The wool and the silk will take the dye differently and I can't wait to see what they look like.

I went today and bought a virtual crapload of Kool-Aid.

Um, can you say new obsession?