Dip Dyeing

Ever since I saw Rebecca from ChemKnits “break” black food coloring, I really wanted to try it myself. A color “breaks” when the component colors are absorbed differently into the wool. What this looks look like with dip-dyed yarn is that the yarn least exposed to the dye has a different hue than the yarn that stays in the pot longer. The wicking action picks up the most reactive color first.

As I want the sweater to be in black and olive green, I wanted to do a little practice dyeing with black. I’ve only used black to overdye other colors, and didn’t know how it would go on undyed yarn. To be honest, I just wanted to dye something, and I was afraid to use my new stuff.

Dip-Dyeing

For fun I pulled out some basic wool a friend gave me a ton of and did a dip-dye gradient. The dye in the pot looked blue, yet the lightest section is a pale mauve, most of the yarn is a toffee color, and the part I left in the dye bath the longest is pretty close to black.

The original pale yellow of the undyed yarn certainly influences the hue. (When I was squeezing the water out of the pre-soaked wool, it smelled strongly of mothballs. I don't know if this is the treatment from the manufacturer or the person who stored it for decades in her house before generously giving it to me.)

This dye took forever to grab on. I probably spent two hours holding and dipping. I finally just let the dark end sit in the pot with the remainder of the skein sitting on the lid. I used the remaining blue dye bath for about 50g (?) of another skein that I wet by squeezing water into but didn’t give a full 30-minute soak. I put it in the hot dye bath and after a few minutes added a couple more drops of black dye to the water and moved it around a little. This produced a cool gray, and some of the blue remained. So it seems the trick to getting a blue and getting a cool gray is to use up the red by dyeing something else first. Because this yarn is different from the O-Wool yarn I plan to use, I expect to repeat this experiment very soon.

I'm really excited to see how different both skeins are, even though they were both dyed with the same food coloring. In the photo, the darkest part of the skein doesn't show, but it's a very dark brown or possibly a warm black. The lighter skein is not so pink as in the photo, but warm and cool tones of gray. I have a lot to learn and a lot of experimenting to do. If I change food coloring brands, I'll have to re-experiment, so I'll stick with the one I'm using for now, McCormick's. Also, it's easy to get at my nearest market.

I’ll probably make socks out of this. I want to play with the striping, and see what it wants to do. Of course I’m curious about slip-stitch patterns as I dyed this skein in a very long repeat and the ends will be a fairly high contrast. So I will see how many stitches I get per repeat, and see what that means for patterning.

Off to wind the skeins and knit up a swatch. Will share wound skein photos in the next post!