Murder, She Wrote

This is a dyeing experiment I've been planning to try for a long time, as it produces very interesting two-color results. And because my two colors are blood red and black, the end result strongly suggests too much reading and watching of crime mysteries :)

The process - the yarn is loosely wound into a ball, not a cake and is submerged into the first color. The dye penetrates unevenly from the outside to the inside of the ball. After the first color is exhausted, the ball is taken out of the dye bath and let to dry a bit. I intentionally collapsed part of my ball, as the dye wasn't penetrating into the ball and I didn't want to be left with a couple of red layers and all white yarn.

After some significant time of struggle with the mess the collapsed ball had created I rewound the yarn, starting from the outer red layer and exposing the white yarn to the outside of the ball.

Then I dropped the ball into the black dye bath. I used the same water, as it already had the citric acid in it, I only added the black dye to the bath.This time I did not collapse the ball, as I didn't want to turn everything black. I like the light greyish - pink transition section, but for fuller coverage one could dye the entire skein red and then cover only part of it with black.

As I wanted to be certain that the dye was well fixed to the yarn, I steamed the yarn for 20 min, placing it in a strainer above the dyeing pot, filled with clear water.

As the yarn is intended for socks for my husband, I had initially double stranded it, so the final step was to divide it back into two one strand cakes - a very time consuming effort, as the yarn was like a 300 m string of twisted threads. I'm not quite sure why this happens, but dyeing two identical cakes with a two-stranded skein always ends into such a twisted string and it is a big nuisance and very unfriendly to the yarn. If my yarn wasn't superwash, it would probably have ended somewhat felted.
Now on to knitting these murderous socks :)