Yesterday was the nicest day so far this year, and I woke up with a mission.
Okay, I woke up, drank two cups of coffee, and THEN I had a mission: dying the recycled sweater yarn I’ve been sitting on for months.
It’s not the same yarn as from my Recycling Sweater Yarn Tutorial, but this one is also whiter than Bill Gates and needing some color. This one has a gorgeous hand, though – at 42% rayon and 17% cotton it’s firm and strong, but the 20% wool content fluffs and softens it some, topped with 5% rabbit hair for a suggestion of luxury. There’s also a 16% nylon content but… whaddyagonnado. It’s WPI is about 14-15 with loose plies – I could respin this batch to tighten the plies but I decided not to because I didn’t want to ruin its loftiness.
So, I whipped out my digital scale and weighed out the yarn in grams. I added a few of the smaller balls to the batch to get it close to a 1/2 lb (250 g) – I had 246 g of yarn, close enough to round up for calculations.
Next I needed to know how many yards I had in the dye batch (this does not affect the dying process, but I needed to know for later). So I measured out 17 yards and weighed it, coming up with 6 grams. Using the formula of grams over yardage, I figured that each yard weighed .353 grams.
This is NOT an exact measurement, because my digital scale isn’t really sensitive enough for this job. But it’s close enough.
I had already purchased dyes for a 3-part colorway for this yarn, so I was going to be dying three separate bundles, making a self-striping yarn. The packages gave instructions for dying 1 lb of yarn. If I was going to be dying 3 parts of a total of 1/2 lb of yarn, I was going to need to figure the dye instructions for 1/6 lb each.
To make things more complicated, I had one dry dye package and 2 liquid dye packages. Yeesh.
The dry Rit came in a package of 31.9 g, with instructions to use one package per pound. Therefore I was going to use 1/6 of a package, or 5.31 g, for my 1/6 lb of yarn.
The liquid dye instructions were for half a bottle to dye 1 lb, and the total bottle was 8 oz. So if 4 oz would dye 1 lb, then .67 oz would dye 1/6 lb.
All instructions were for a 3 gallon dye bath for 1 lb, so 1/2 gallon dye bath would do for each of my 1/6 lb sections.
Time to separate the sections.
I wanted long color changes, so I decided I would change colors every 20 yards. After three 20-yard wraps and tie-offs with the niddy noddy, I realized doing those sections individually would take 4 zillion years. So I sacrificed precision for speed and used three chair backs – each wraparound a bit longer than a yard, but whatever.
At this point I realized that with three chair backs I would adjust my color changing scheme a bit – the middle color would get 10 yards for every pass since it got wrapped twice for every round. Not super important, but it means the middle color would occur more frequently in the final product. At this point I decided the middle color would be silver.
There are devices that one can use to make color-changing yarn dying easier. I did not wait to secure one of these devices, so chair backs it was.
I wrapped all of the balls together, deciding I would sort them back out later. I am patient with tangles.
I took my three conjoined bundles and dunked them in hot water to soak. The dye instructions advised I add salt for cotton or plant fabrics OR vinegar for wool fabrics. This yarn was both. I added neither – knowing that this would be a color gamble anyway. Plus I was out of white vinegar.
Time to dunk. I used bamboo skewers to stir my yarn in the dye bath, poking and prodding for 30 minutes. The powder dye bath (cocoa brown) looked WAY darker than the liquid baths – curious. I was worried that it would be too strong compared to the other colors, but this was mysteriously not the case. The liquid “wine” color did not take to the yarn at all the way I was aiming for – it was pink! Horrors! After the 30 minutes was up, I actually gave my pink section a quick dunk in the brown to calm down the girliness.
All joking aside, the colors looked really good together when rinsed. Yes, they were muted. Yes, they weren’t what I had planned in my mind’s eye – but dying them and getting something a little surprising was a lot of fun. Sometimes it’s good to not get exactly what you want – it forces you to innovate and move outside of your comfort zone.
In the end I am thrilled with my first self-striper attempt, and am practically hopping up and down in anticipation of stitching with it.
-MF
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