Hand dyed yarn

I’ve always loved the beautiful colourways that you can get from commercially dyed yarn but I wanted to have more control over the colours I used. So a few weeks after Christmas, I set myself the challenge of dyeing some of my own yarn.

After many failed attempts, I finally managed to get the effect I wanted whilst making it colourfast. I don’t know what fibre it was as it was an old yarn out of my stash with no label, but it turned out really well. No colour bled from it when I came to wash it and the overall result was a beautiful ombré from purple to blue. I used Wilton’s violet food colouring to dye my yarn. I wasn’t expecting it to turn blue but when I unwound the ball, I noticed that the colour had broken in the middle.

Here is a picture of the yarn wound onto an improvised niddy-noddy: a piano stool! When I wound it on, I was amazed at the colours and how subtly it blended between the purple and the blue.

I then wound it into a centre-pull ball using my ball-winder.

Another method I tried was with some Sharpies and a sock-blank. I used an old jumper sleeve as my sock-blank, as the commercial blanks cost quite a bit. The sleeve was about 100g and it used an acrylic yarn. I decided to draw an ocean sunset design on my blank so it would give a random pattern when unravelled.

 

I then ironed it, washed it and unravelled it. The overall effect came out speckled rather than in blocks of colour.

Here is the unravelled blank wound into a cake. I love how it turned out!