First dye

Last night, as promised, I dyed my handspun. My husband picked up some Kool-Aid colors for me yesterday afternoon, but couldn't find blue. I found some liquid food coloring in my spice cabinet, so I mixed up 1 part apple cider vinegar to about 5 parts water, then added drops of blue until it was the shade I wanted. The yellow is 2 packages of Kool Aid Lemonaid + 1 jelly jar of water.

I stacked the two large hanks together so that I wouldn't have to worry about reproducing a second hank exactly. (I intend to use these two hanks as hats for my little boys and want them to match, because I'm crazy like that.) Using a big, disposable Ziploc container, I draped the yarn and poured whatever color I wanted in that part. Then I poured any run-off back into the dye jar.

Once the yarn was dyed to my specifications, I poured off the last of the dye in the container, curled the yarn up and put the lid mostly on. Then I microwaved it until any water running from the yarn was clear (about 4 minutes).

This is what happens when you don't wear gloves:

After dying and microwaving the yarn a first time, my husband pointed out that the blue was not very vivid (or, in his words "Did you want the blue to be brighter?") Nice way to say that the dye job looked anemic. Isn't he sweet? So anyway, I overdyed the center of each blue section. Since the yarn was already saturated with a bunch of leftover water, the blue ran into the yellow a good deal, which wasn't what I'd really intended, but I like the end result.

Here is my yarn drying. As you can see, the tiny center skein was dyed with a different dye-lot of blue. I forgot to save some from the first two hanks....oh well. I might use it for edging.

I must say, I LOVE this shade of blue! I'll have to use McCormicks food coloring again.

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