How to overdye your hand knits using food coloring.

So as you might know by now, I'm expecting identical twin boys in June. So of course I'm thrilled to be knitting and crocheting as much as I can for them during my pregnancy. In fact, I'm doing a weekly vlog about it over on my youtube channel.

One project that I recently finished is the In a Pear Tree baby Cardigan. The pattern is available as a free Ravelry download, and was designed by the Barbarian Horde.

I knit it using some yarn that I had recycled and dyed... thinking that since the yarn had both blue and pink in it, it might somehow be gender neutral. (I knit this up before I knew if I was expecting boys or girls).

But yeah... it totally looks like a girl's sweater.

So I thought, why not see if I can overdye it blue?

So I got out my handy dandy dye pot, and dug out all of my blue food colouring and got to work.

Oh I filmed it too!

And I have to say, I think I like the result.

It came out maybe a little darker than I wanted, but that's ok, I still like it. Now I'm off to go knit a second one, and overdye it differently (because twins shouldn't match perfectly, right?)

Let me know if you've had any successful overdyeing experiments in the comments below!

May Etsy Update: all the yarns!

Yesterday I did a major Etsy shop update, with tonnes of beautiful hand dyed, recycled yarns. Here are some of my favourites.

These beauties are from the same sweater, love that pop of sparkle in this great wool acrylic blend.

All three of these colourways were dyed on the same %100 lambs wool sweater base. They're sport weight and would make a great pop of colour in a shawl (especially a West Knit).

Check out my shop for more great yarns at great prices! 

Easter Dye LeftOvers

The best thing about Easter, if you're into Dyeing yarn that is, is all the leftover dye in bright colours that's around afterwards. You can usually find egg dyeing kits after the holiday for as little as a dollar. And those kits contain enough acid-reactive dye to colour a fair amount of yarn, even after it's been used on eggs.

I mixed up the dye pellets according to the package directions. Dissolved 1 pellet in 1 tbsp of vinegar, once fully dissolved I added half a cup of warm water.

Added my eggs and voila, beautiful, vibrant colours. No heating necessary. Under the acidic conditions, the food color in the pellets binds to the proteins of the egg shell. Now just to get it to bind to the proteins in my yarn.

I used a skein of recycled yarn, 40% wool, 60% acrylic I believe. And while the acrylic wont pick up any of the color, there should be enough wool content to still get a nice vibrant yarn.

I pre-soaked for only about 10 minutes, and wrung out my yarn (this step is important, you don't want the yarn fully saturated, you want it to be wet to break the surface tension, but still ready to soak up your dye). If you were using 100% wool, you might want to be careful about wringing out the yarn to get the excess water out (try a salad spinner?) to avoid felting, but since this is a blend, it was ok. Then I spread it into a roasting pan and began pouring my dye onto the yarn. I used paper towel to absorb any liquid that the yarn wasn't, since I didn't want my colours to bleed across the pan. I also arranged my colours according to the colour wheel so adjacent colours could blend into each other without muddying.

Then I popped the pan (with the lid on) into the oven at 100'C/225'F for about 20-30min. Remove from the oven and let cool to room temp before rinsing (again you don't want to risk shocking your yarn and felting it).

I don't have any of the pictures of the finished yarn with me, so I'll edit them to the post later, but the finished result looks great! This was my first go at dyeing in the oven, and I can't wait to give it another go.

Hand Painted recycled yarn.

Available on Etsy.

This weekend I hand painted my very first yarn.

The yarn was recycled from a thrift store sweater.

The fiber content is 42% wool, 25% viscose, 21% nylon, 8% angora and 4% cashemere, and the yarn is a DK.

I pre-soaked the skeins in room temperature water with a bit of white vinegar in it.

And prepared my Wilton's food colouring dyes. (I love the way the purple started breaking right on the paper towel!

I lay out my skeins on some plastic wrap.

And started painting. I way underestimated how much dye I'd need for so much yarn, and mixed up some more.

Look at those beautiful colours! The pink broke out of the purple.

Next, rolled the whole thing up and popped it into the microwave.

Once it had cooled it was into the bath tube to wash, and hang to dry.

The colors turned out beautifully.

Especially with Easter on it's way.

One skein will be listed on Etsy to sell, a whopping 450 yards, great for a project like a shall.

Another 450 yards I wrapped up for my self. The mini skein...well I'll be saving that for something special.