Spring Jewel

Here are pictures of my second yarn dyeing project. I used the leftover dye from my “First Day of Spring” color way and added a green and blue Easter Egg dye pellet. I absolutely LOVE the tonal coloring in the skein.  I used the same base, Knit Picks Bare Fingering Weight yarn since I plan on using the two colors, plus a third not yet dyed, to make a shawl.

Second skein dyed – called Spring Jewel

Spring Jewel – being washed

I had very little color bleed out of the yarn as I washed it with some Soak wool wash.

Here is the yarn wound into a skein

This picture shows the yarn a tad bluer than it really is but you can see the different shading.  I am ecstatic how easy it is to turn bare yarn into something so pretty!

As I was twisting this yarn into a hank, I had my third yarn simmering away.  You’ll see that in my next post.

My first adventure in yarn dyeing!

I’ve wanted to dye some yarn for a shawl design I have in my head.  I’ve been watching YouTube videos from ChemKnits and tried to replicate the yarn in her Easter Egg pellet dyeing experiment.

I started out with a hank of yarn from KnitPicks called Bare fingering weight yarn composed of 75% Superwash Merino Wool, 25% Nylon.

What I love about this technique is seeing how the bare yarn sucks in the color.  Now, I had watched another of Rebecca’s tutorials on the differences with dyeing a loosely wound cake of yarn vs. a regular cake of yarn.  I probably should have re-wound the cake so it was looser but I kept an eye on the yarn and poked around the inside and when I saw lots of white, I let the dye soak into that section and I moved around the inside of the hank.  I also made sure that the my cake of yarn was completely submerged because I didn’t want a lot of white.  Once the yarn was cooling, I put a little clear Pyrex glass container to keep the cake submerged.

Here are the pictures of the progress.

Just submerged

Cooling down after simmering approximately 40 minutes to get most of the color in.

Beginning to wind the cool wet yarn onto my homemade niddy noddy.

Middle of the cake of yarn. I’d put a blue and purple tablet inside the cake.

All wound up and drying

Leftover dye that I’ll use to make a tonal color

Wound up into a hank

I am so excited to introduce my first color way, “First Day of Spring”.

As I write this post, my second hank of yarn in a turquoise tonal color is outside on my porch in the 42 degree Fahrenheit weather, cooling down so I can wind it on my niddy noddy.  I’d told my husband that I needed another one so I could have more yarn drying at the same time.

Uh oh…..do you know what that means?

I think I’ve created a monster — I might be addicted to yarn dying!