The Chocolate Color

Let me start with the ascertainment that ever since I started dyeing yarn, I've overdyed every beige yarn I've bought, as well as a beige cotton shop bought sweater I had :) Beige turns out to be a color I'm drawn to buy but not to wear - neutral drab colors are not for me, it seems.

A few months ago I came upon Hipster - a shawl pattern by Joji Locatelli and I immediately fell in love with it. I've been following Joji's podcast and admiring her creativity a lot, she's one of my main inspirations to start sewing again, as apart from a talented knitter and designer, she's also a fearless beginner seamstress.
So, when I was browsing my favourite online yarn shop for tweed for another project I came upon a sale of this beige Italian bobbin tweed and I grabbed 200 g of it for Hipster. But the moment it arrived I knew I had to overdye it (again!). I experimented with at least a dozen of small cuttings from the yarn, shifting it from tobacco yellow to dark purple, until I settled on chocolate. And I'm loving it. This is my current WIP, but more about it and the yarn in (I hope) a coming soon posting :)

And while I still had chocolate color on my mind I finally decided how to overdye the viscose yarn I had bought for my mother. The result of another sale purchase - 6 skeins of baby blue viscose-acrylic yarn, three for me and three for my mother, were waiting to be overdyed. The yarn is very soft, the color is nice, but neither mother nor I would wear this baby blue. I had been struggling for a week with the decision, having in mind, that unlike the wool, which is so easy to dye, viscose acrylic blends take dye differently and more difficultly. And of course they require dyes for cellulose based yarns. 

To ensure good cover of the blue, I dyed these skeins in two steps - first I dyed the three skeins solid brown, washed them and hung them to dry to ascertain that they had the color I wanted (wet viscose looks much much darker than dry viscose and I wanted to be sure). Then I dip glazed them in concentrated black for a more variegated final color.

I think they turned out quite nice, with deep saturated color. Because I dyed each skein separately, there are some variations between the skeins and as with all hand-dyed yarns it would be recommendable to be knitted with alternation.

I was curious, so I made two samples to check the gauge. The yarn is thin - 400 m / 100 g, so it could be knitted with a single thread or with two threads held together. I was leaning towards the thicker option, but in the end I like the single thread sample better. Of course, it's up to my mother to decide which she prefers.

Now I'm off to pack all the yarns I dyed for my mom lately and send them to her to keep her busy during the coming months.

Into The Sea, Galaxy, М&M Colorways

I dyed some yarn these last two days - three 50 g skeins, intended to become socks.

Into the Sea
It pains me how dull and washed look the colors of this skein in the photos, in real life they are so vivid and neon. For this skein I combined two methods: first, I twisted the skein, soaked it in water and dipped it into sea green dye (blue egg dye with some green egg dye). I let the twisted skein soak most of the green and then untwisted it, so that the white parts could be dyed in the remaining pale blue. When all of the dye was absorbed, I added some acid dark blue, to tone down the neon effect of the egg dyes.

Then I took the yarn out of the dye pot and added some black dye to the hot water, made three knots in the skein and dipped it in the black for some black glazing and richer depth of color. The Dark nuances, combined with the neon green and neon blue really make it a spectacular skein, I'm so impressed with this method of dyeing.

Galaxy
For the second skein I combined hand painting and fixing the dye in the microwave oven, and then dipping half of the skein into dark violet to get the cosmic dark sky color:

I am in love with this skein, violet and yellow are such an impressive combination.

M&M
For this third skein I used again hand painting with a syringe. I made three dye solutions of the primary colors yellow, red and blue, diluting the dyes into citric acid water. The yellow crushed, so I made a forth solution of yellow food coloring and then randomly dyed first one side, then flipped the skein and dyed the other side, using the syringe. Although the acid yellow looked dull and brown in the cup, it turned nice orange-y yellow in the skein and the food color yellow is a bit more lemon-y.

After covering as much as I could of the yarn, I wrapped it and fixed the colors in the microwave.

I'm really happy with my yarns and curious to see them into socks :)

Tropical

My latest dyeing was inspired by the YouTube channels of two lovely ladies I've been following for several months - Rebeca's Chemknit's Tutorials and Jessica L'Heureux.

: After soaking the yarn for an hour, I placed it in my dyeing pot, where the water with citric acid was at the point of boiling. I had prepared three solutions of yellow, orange and red (which turned to be more magenta than red really, it came from an egg dyeing tablet, not my usual acid dye). I poured 2/3 of each cup of dye along the sides of the pot, trying to assign one third of the pot for each dye.

: After the dye had been exhausted I added the remaining 1/3 of each cup to fill in the gaps, trying to cover most of the yarn with dye.

: After all of the dye had been absorbed by the yarn, I took the yarn out of the pot and let it cool off for a while. In the meantime I added more citric acid to the pot and 1/4 cup of black dye.

: I made two knots in the dyed skein to provide some resist, took a deep breath and dipped the yarn into the black dye

: The result is this colorful skein, with some of the yellow, orange and magenta of the initial dyeing preserved due to the resist knots, plus the new colors from the black glazing - purple, green and brown.

: To me this speaks tropical and I love it! I'm eager to explore further the possibilities of this dyeing method.

: I've already cast on a pair of socks - Hermione's everyday socks, a free and very popular pattern on Ravelry: