Sewings and Goings; Love of History, Historic and Vintage Fashion

Sewings and Goings; Love of History, Historic and Vintage Fashion

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Learning to dye yarn!

Ok, today I finally decided to learn to dye yarn! It started with using the legs of a chair to get that wrap around yarn and then tie it so it wouldn't fall off and to put it in the pot of dye! LOL.. wow my left arm hurt from going up and around the darn legs, lol! Ok, need to get skein winder do hicky for to do the looping wrap around stuff! Anyways, I dyed the 3/4 strands of fisherman's wool yarn with CRANBERRIES, above all things.. it worked!! Had the yarn soaked in warm water with some white distilled vinegar and had that in for about 20-30 minutes and had on at the same time the water with the cranberries and put a little bit of red food dye in that.. whatever food/flower/dye you use whether it's beets or onion skins or kool aid or blueberries.. make sure you keep that on for about an hour to settle in, and then put in your yarn and let that simmer and boil for about 40-45 minutes... it's so cool to watch that process from your plain white wool yarn turning to that pink/blue/ purple/brown color that you're aiming for!!! Then once you had that done boiling, you rinse in warm water and then set it on a drying rack (say for laundry) and put the yarn on a plastic bag just so it doesn't leak everywhere.. it needs to dry and keep some towels around if it's around in the kitchen. This is so easy of a project that anyone can do it!! I'll have pictures of the yarn before and after posted up tomorrow!! I'll be sure to be posting MORE blogs this month than in the past couple .. being scarce and few... and not having a lot of energy to pull together to get some knitting/crocheting projects done or any sewing projects... I'll be making sure to do so this time!! Alright, will be writing again soon! Happy Sewing!