Dyeing variegated yarn with Wilton's

My pal let me know that she received her yarn yesterday, so I can post the stories of its birth.

The first yarn that I attempted (and actually completed) was an orange, brown and green self-striping yarn, detailed in a post I wrote yesterday.

As mentioned, I wasn't thrilled with how tangled it got and how many times I had to re-skein it (and the felting that occurred) so I decided to make a second skein a different way.

I chose colors that I thought might look neat together (all the shades of blue/purple in my Wilton's kit). I washed the yarn (again using Knit Picks' dye-your-own sock yarn) with dish detergent and then soaked it in cool water with vinegar. I prepared three mason jars with the dye (royal blue, sky blue and violet) mixed with vinegar. Then I dunked portions of the skein in each:


I microwaved the whole mass (putting the jars into a pyrex casserole dish to catch overflow first) for five minutes and let it sit until it was room temperature (actually, this one sat overnight). I then rinsed it until the water ran clear and laid it out to dry.

When it was dry, I skeined it with the niddy noddy:

And then made my own labels to send it to my sock pal, along with the self-striping one:

Dyeing Self-Striping Yarn with a Warping Board

I had my DH make Scout's Ghetto Warping Board for me as a Mother's Day gift.


I couldn't wait to try my hand at self-striping yarn! However, I found that there were very few tutorials online for using a warping board and really none that showed how to use it the way Scout does. So I emailed/pestered Scout a bit and then came up with this:

(For this skein, I only wanted three colors, so I put only 6 pegs into the top 3 sets of holes. You use the outer holes to wrap and the inner holes to dry, as the yarn shrinks somewhat when wet.)











Something to keep in mind is that this method of warping/wrapping will produce a repeating pattern that jogs back. That is, if you use green, red, yellow for your colors, it will not do green, red, yellow, green, red, yellow stripes, but will do green, red, yellow, red, green, red, yellow...)



Start with a slip knot on the upper left peg.














Each wrap from left to right constitutes one knit row, so you need to wrap multiple times on the same set of pegs in order to have longer stripes. I chose a 3-2-2 wrap pattern (3x around the top pegs, 2x each pass through the middle pegs, 2 times around the bottom) so that I would have more brown than orange, and the most green, though it would be smaller stripes--just repeated more often.

When wrapping/warping, the most important thing to be careful of, is to avoid making full loops around any peg (too difficult to remove it from the peg, tie it off, then return it to the peg). If at all possible, you want to create big, loose loops, but in order to get the yarn at the top to wrap in the correct direction, you need to make a big figure 8 shape on the top and bottom pegs. Here's a rough sketch of wrapping on the way down: and then (in red) the wrapping on the way up:

When it is all wrapped, it looks a bit like this:













The next thing you want to do is tie off the loops at each end with polyester yarn like this:












And then it's time to dye! First I soaked the yarn in water with vinegar (the next batch I did, I washed it with dish detergent first and the color took better!):



I covered my stovetop with three big sheets of saran wrap and laid out the yarn, after I'd wrung as much water out as I could:

I mixed up the dye (using Wilton's food paste--next time I'd make it even more concentrated):

I dribbled the dye onto the sections of yarn, using lots of paper towel to sop up the stuff that ran off. Then I wrapped the saran wrap around the sections :

and put the saran-wrapped sections back into a pyrex bowl and put it in the microwave for 6 minutes:

I took it out of the microwave and let it cool to room temperature (about 4-5 hours) and then I rinsed it:



and put it back onto the warping board to dry (unfortunately, I'd wrapped it so tightly that I couldn't get it to fit over all three sets of pegs! oops...):
And when it was dry I niddy-noddied it (It's the lower skein):

Some comments:
The only issues were when I was trying to put the yarn into a useable skein. It turned into a tangled, pilling, awful mess! I had to un-niddy-noddy it and put it into a ball first, then niddy-noddy, then that didn't work well, so I had to re-ball and re-NN it. ugh! So...
Next time I'll try to cross the yarns a lot less when wrapping
Next time, even if I'm only using 3 colors, I'll use all 6 sets of pegs, so there's less yarn on each
Next time I will be careful not to wrap so tightly (the pegs were folding in)
Next time I'll wash the yarn with dish detergent
Next time I'll mix the dye more concentrated

Dye-O-Rama--the good and the bad

I will start with the good, the wonderful, the fantastic, the really, really, really COOL stuff. My yarn arrived from my pal, Desdemona . It is beautiful and so perfect! C. is fighting over it with me, as it's all her favorite colors. Here's the pic:
The colors aren't as brilliant as they are in person. It's a denim blue, tealy-kinda green, and deep pink that's almost purple. Scrumptious! (as is the chocolate bar that came with it! lol)

Now before you think that I am slacking off on working on the yarn for MY pal, I want to give some background on what I've done since the beginning of Dye-O-Rama. I signed up on April 22nd and immediately ordered my dye-your-own yarn from KnitPicks. I'd done a variegated yarn for Sockapaloooza, and was pleased with the way that turned out, but I really wanted to learn how to make striped yarn for socks! I found a cool website that showed how to string yarn all over your house to stripe it, but figured that might strangle at least one child... Then I found directions for Scout's Ghetto Warping Board. This, I thought, was the board for me! I ran to Home Depot and bought the materials and told DH that he could make this for my Mother's Day gift. Of course, that meant that I didn't get the board until Mother's Day... So we're already up to May 14th. I immediately do a "dry run" with some cheap Lion Brand Fisherman's wool and three extremely differently colored Wilton food pastes (pink, green, blue). Hmmm...

Other than the green barely showing up at all, it's okay... and knit up, it's definitely stripey!!! :) I learned a few things--namely that, when using the warping board, it wraps down and then back up, so you don't get a regular repeat (A,B,C,A,B,C...) but a palindrome-type repeat (A,B,C,B,A,B,C). I also figured out that, with socks, one loop will be one round, and I think I want wider stripes than that. Not a bad start, though.

So I read my Pal's dye-o-meme-o-rama and find out that she likes peach and aqua shades. I don't own either of these in Wilton food paste, so I head to Michael's to buy some. Luckily, a package exists with both peach AND aqua. I do another trial, using the warping board and Fishermen's wool, and my new Wilton dye. See anything wrong with the colors?In case you can't tell, the peach is fuschia and the aqua is PURPLE??? (the natural actually stayed natural)

And then I heard from my dye pal that she'd sent my yarn and I REALLY panicked.

So I'm falling back on what I know. Today I wrapped (warped?) an entire skein of yarn on my warping board and dyed it with the same three colors that I used for my Sock Pal's socks (brown, moss green and orange). These were listed as colors that my Dye Pal likes, so I hope she accepts my sincerest apologies and likes the brown/green/orange yarn, too.

As soon as the yarn dries, I'll twist it up and try to write a tutorial of sorts for using Scout's Warping Board. I hope that will help some people who were confused as to how to use it. I think it worked really well and I'm excited to twist up the yarn (and to see how it knits up!), but I'm still really annoyed with the peach and aqua... I guess I may have to try some "real" dyes and not just the food types... (addiction....) Oh, well, DH wanted to get some tie dye stuff from Dharma anyway. :)