Dyeing speckled yarn

Another yarn dyeing experiment and a very successful one indeed! As there has been somewhat of a recent hype (if you can call it like that in the micro universe of indie knitters, spinners, and dyers) about speckled, gradient, and marled yarn I have to admit I have also been affected. Pretty pictures on ravelry and instragram do not help, either, and so I suddenly felt the urge to try and dye some speckled yarn myself. For those who are not part of above-mentioned universe: "speckled" refers to small splashes and bits of colour in an otherwise naturally white or uniformely coloured yarn. Some nice examples that I like can be found here or here. 

As one nowadays does, the first step to starting my project was googling a good tutorial. I found this one by "Fiber Artsy" and it seemed pretty straight forward, so I followed it. I only adjusted a few steps, such as mordanting with alum and using textile dye instead of KoolAid (sadly not available in Belgium). To show what I did exactly I summarized it step-by-step below:

Preparation

I used a 100 % wool yarn which I think was treated to be "superwash" but really nothing special. It was already wound in skein so I had to unwind it to be able to dye it (see picture above). I used my swift but honestly, I think it would have been faster by hand. Except that I was missing a second pair of hands. Anyway, the swift did the job.

Mordanting

As in my previous dyeing experiments (with rhubarb root and with avocado)I used alum as a dye agent, which is potassium aluminium sulfate. You can buy it easily in a good arts supply shop or in a classic "droguerie" such as "Le Lion" in Rue de Laeken in Brussels. It's not dangerous to use but it is a chemical substance so it's better to take precautions and definitely do not use it in a normal cooking pot! Any old pot will do, provided it is big enough and preferably made of steel so that it doesn't leak anything into the dye bath. In the picture above you see I'm using en emaille pot which is actually not the best but the biggest I have. It's important that the yarn is floating freely, otherwise it felts very easily and your yarn is ruined.

 I used a solution based on 10 % alum based on the dry weight of the yarn, in this case it was 10 g of alum to ca. 2 l of water. However, I think less would also work so next time I'll reduce the amount. In my workshop on dyeing with natural ingredients, we used citric acid as a mordant which can be bought in the supermarket. Vinegar solutions can also work but usually bring out less vibrant colours than chemical mordants like alum (saying that, technically all mordants are "chemicals", even if they occur naturally because they all start a chemical reaction. But I leave it up to the experts to make a proper distinction between the natural vs. chemical discussion).

Preparing the yarn for the dye

I used our kitchen for the dyeing procedure but I made sure everything was wrapped safely with cling film to avoid splashing the dye everywhere (not healthy). I also wore plastic gloves, which is the reasons why most of the pictures look very dodgy! In order to get the yarn ready, I removed it from the mordant bath after ca. 15 minutes, let the yarn cool down and removed access liquid by letting it drip off over the sink and gently pressing the yarn. Again, don't be too rough and don't hold it under cold water because that will cause it to felt.

Let the fun begin!

After spreading out the still humid yarn on the tray, finally I could start the fun. I used the textile dye pictured above which is pretty standard dye that you can use also for bigger dyeing projects, including in the washing machine. It's the first time I used this kind of powder dye so I had no idea what to expect. I basically did it the same way as the KoolAid was used in the tutorial: I sprinkled some of the dry powder onto the yarn but the effect was not visible at once. Then I became a bit more adventurous and dissolved small quantities of the powder in water and started splashing the dye over the yarn with a paint brush. In the end I even just "painted" the yarn with the brush directly to cover bigger surface areas. I used red, yellow, green, and blue dye.

I turned the yarn around several times to makes sure most areas were covered. For that, the skein has to be bound together very loosely, otherwise you have white stripes where it is gathered too tightly. Mine was maybe a little too loose, which resulted in my skein almost disintegrating in the end. So something in between those two situations would be ideal. 

Fixating the colours

Sorry, no pictures of this stage. Again I followed the tutorial on the website and it worked like a charm. I wrapped the skein into cling film and put it into an oven dish. I put it in the microwave, first 1 minute at a time to test, three times, and then 5 minutes. So 8 minutes in total. The dish did get hot and so did the yarn inside the film so I think it's better to check regularly because I don't know how easily the yarn can catch fire. When I thought it was done, I removed the yarn from the cling film and let it cool down. I then rinsed it in the sink to see if there was any excess dye coming out but it was almost nothing. 

The result

The result was way better than I had expected. Beautiful colours, gradients of all kinds, and more or less evenly distributed! I was surprised that the dye which were only the primary colours, merged so nicely and created this whole spectrum of different shades, as you can see above. 

Of course, some sections are better than others and in some places there is a bit too much dye. I didn't distribute the colours very evenly, which results in some very intense colour-blotches. Next time I would probably use less dye in general and fewer colours, leaving the natural white as the dominant colour. I like the yarns that only have a few highlights, but I'm always so tempted when I start the process. Less is definitely more in this kind of dyeing process, though.