Food dyes and yarn

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at dyeing yarn for a quite a few years, but have never until now taken that extra step to actually doing it. Eskimimi’s blog post about her gorgeous colourful hand-dyed yarns gave me that little shove to give it a bash myself.

Armed with some Rutland Tweed Morcott, food colouring and vinegar, here what I’ve come up with so far…

  

It’s not been a total success, but I’m pretty happy with what I’ve ended up with. The yellow was my second try (I forgot to take photos of my first!) and was meant to be a pinky peach. That clearly didn’t work! I now know that the natural food colourings are essentially useless for yarn dyeing purposes! The yellow is the only one that really has any effect. I actually quite like the yellow though.

Having realised this, I searched out some artificial cochineal from the kitchen cupboard and had another try which was a lot better, except that the dye was a pretty uneven! I swear I’ll have success at last :) The tweedy flecks in amongst the pinky red of this one make me think of strawberries and watermelon.

These are only 50g hanks, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them. I’m hopefully going to search out more dyes this weekend for some more dyeing experimentation. I’ve been rather fascinated by natural dyeing for some time now, so I’m definitely keen to give that go once I’m a bit more familiar with this malarkey!

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FO: Haruni

My knitting mojo has been somewhat lacking of late, but the needles have not been entirely idle.

Haruni by Emily Ross

Yarn: Regia Stretch Color
Ravelled here

I love this pattern, it’s beautiful.

This was my post-exam knitting treat. I’d wanted to knit it for quite a while, but thought it’d be quite a complex pattern so put it aside until my exams were finished and then went at it.

The pattern was surprisingly straight forward, I think it’s one that looks more complex than it actually is. The first pattern chart was quite easily memorised. I found the second chart a little trickier as it was quite hard to read the lace until I was several rows in, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be. I finished it in 2 weeks, which I think is some kind of record for me!

I wasn’t too sure I’d made the right choice with the Regia Stretch yarn, which I predominantly chose because I love the colour. I mentioned how sproingy it was when I blogged about my Earl Grey socks, and whilst I was knitting Haruni I was little concerned about how that would work for a shawl/scarf. I needn’t have worried though, it blocked out perfectly! I used my new blocking set up for this, which I’ll blog about soon.

I love the leaf border and the crochet cast off the pattern uses. The only mods I made were to knit an extra repeat of the first chart for a slightly longer scarf, although I’d have liked to have seen how it would have turned out with another couple of repeats!

Just a quick shot to end on of me wearing it this morning in my Beavis/Cornholio pyjamas… I’m a class act all the way :)

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