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!
