Thanks for sharing the link, Sue! Readers, if you find such cool resources or stories that should be shared, I’d love it if you sent me the link via a comment!

Here is a tutorial I’ve written up, illustrating one of the methods I use to dye the yarn I spin (from the Shetland fleeces bought in the summer). It uses food dyes, so you do not need to purchase dedicated equipment. For more pictures of the process please visit my Flickr Yarn Dyeing album.

Equipment

Pictured in the two pictures above is all of the equipment you’ll need. Above are some spare pans for rinsing and soaking, jars for each color, the yarn itself, citric acid (can be bought online, I found mine at Bulk Barn), and food dyes. You will also need a pot to steam the jars in, and a rack to elevate the jars.

Preparation

Using yarn scraps of another texture, divide your skein roughly into two (or three if it’s really large), weave the yarn scrap to form a figure eight, and tie it together. This ensures the skein is loose enough to let the dye permeate completely, and also keeps it organized when moving it around. Using the different texture makes it really easy to find these figure eights later on when they’re the same color as the rest of the yarn!

Create an acidic solution using the citric acid and a spare pot. I don’t measure it at all, I simply make it so that it’s acidic when I taste it. Soak the yarn in this solution while mixing the dyes. Note: You can get a different effect if you make the dyes acidic instead of the yarn, and some people let it soak much longer.

Dye Mixing

Mix up your colours in the jars. Here I’ve used a shotglass in which I’ve diluted one small drop of red with water. I used this to change the raw yellow into this golden color. I also mixed another gold that was even deeper than this.

In this tutorial I am not being precise, thus I am not measuring the number of drops of dye I use, etc. If you foresee wanting to replicate the colors you make, it’s valuable to measure the amounts you add. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you can make the same size “drop” each time, or that your technique remains the same! I consider this a part of the art. If you know you want 5 skeins of one pattern, doing them at the same time will give you the best odds of making 5 similar looking skeins.

Note: the amount of water in the dye mix doesn’t really matter, what matters more is the number of molecules of dye. I’ll explain this in a bit.

Dyeing and Steaming

Put the dye jars into the pot and add hot water up to the level of the jar’s contents. Here I’ve dipped each end of yarn into one dye pot, as I wanted to go for a gradient effect. By quickly dipping, only a small number of dye molecules adhere to the wool. I then left a portion of the dipped part in the dye jar to allow the dye molecules to keep adhering and thus deepen the color.

If your skein length is too small to reach the dye in the jars, you can simply add water to the dye jars to bring the level up to where you want it to be. The color will not change, as adding water does not affect the number of dye molecules in the solution – while the dye will look lighter to our eyes, in reality it will result in the same yarn color.

Cover the pot and steam that yarn! For how long? I go for about 10 minutes, checking now and then to change the dip depth and look for dye exhaustion. This is when the jar’s mixture turns clear, and means all of the dye molecules have been absorbed, what you see colorwise is as good as it’ll go (with this mixture). This is what one should strive for, as leftover color mixture means you are using a bit too much raw dye, but in reality the cost of dye is pretty negligible so it’s not much of a big deal to drain it.

Once your yarn is done, transfer it to a draining container and rinse it out. Using hot water, indirectly filling up the container, and being gentle helps to avoid felting and tangling. I gently prod and shake it, and continue until no more color comes 0ut. Then, gently squeeze it out and hang it up on a hanger. I also give it a gentle pull to straighten out any excess twist. The hanger hangs in my bathroom until the yarn is dry, which takes longer for larger skeins of course. I usually give it a few days just to be safe. Then you can reskein it to get a better impression of the yarn, or keep it as is!

Here’s a view of the final yarn ready to dry. You can see the differences in the two yellow/golds, and while the gradient effect was much more muted than I would have liked, oh well, it still looks nice!

This yarn already has a purpose in mind, it’s the next color in my four colour log cabin knit blanket I’m working on. Once this dries out I’ll continue documenting its journey, taking the time to share this very simple yet pretty cool blanket pattern with you!