I’ve been interested in trying to see if I can dye a skein gradually transforming rainbow colours from the start to the end. What I mean is that I don’t want the rainbow to repeat, just that the one end is red and migrates through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and ends up as violet. So I decided to try and see if it was possible to wind up a skein and then divide it into seven and dye each of those pieces. While playing around with the yarn winder, I discovered that this was not really possible because it needs to continue turning the other remaining parts otherwise I assume tangles. So I gave up on that plan for the day and just continued winding the ball. It turned out very loose, so that gave me a new plan.
I put the new loose cake in a bath to soak for a little bit and went upstairs to the dye cupboard for a pan, a metal basket and the first leftover dye stock I could find. This turned out to be something I’d scribbled ‘blue-grey’ on, so I guess this experiment was going to be blue-grey. Once the cake had soaked enough, I put it in the basket to leak a bit of the water. The dye stock was added to the pan with more water and some vinegar. The basket was lowered into the water and then simmered for 30-40 minutes. After that, it was left to cool. The yarn was Natural Boo DK, a merino and bamboo mix.
The reason it’s an experiment was because I wasn’t sure how the dye would be soaked up by this loose cake. Would it have lots of white spots? Be darker on the outside or underside? Would it turn out very light? Would it even work? Turns out that the bottom was indeed much darker than the top, which still had some white remaining. When it was dry and I balled it up again, inside out, it turned out much lighter than to start with. It reminds me of the colour of jeans, perhaps it’ll be a fun scarf!
