So Thuy had a wonderful post about using food dye to dye your roving. I had Tracy run over to Smart & Final on her lunch & get me the dye. Perfect! She drops it off at the house, I hank up a ball of Knitpicks dye your own merino sock yarn & off I go. I wanted to do the first hank with a section of each of the colors so I knew the true potency of the dye colors; yellow, blue, red. You can’t see it in the photo but I just went off my instinct on how much I used of each color mixed with water to make a total quantity of 2 cups liquid. I used the most yellow, then a bit less blue & the least red. I would do more red the next time to get it a deep red, not cherry red.
I dunked each section in the color individually then moved the hank around to the next color section and once again for the third color. I had a cookie sheet out with plastic wrap on it to lay the colored hank on. Once the entire hank had color I wrapped that baby up in the plastic and nuked it for 3 minutes.
I pulled it out, unrolled it so that it could cool faster & then kept poking & prodding to see the colors.
Here is where the yellow (on the right) and the blue (on the upper left) join. It’s a very pretty brown down on that yellow end. I kinda like!
Here it all is while it is cooling and below it is getting a rinse. I have to say I was rather surprised that the rinse went so quickly. I put it on a baking cooling rack and just let the aerated water run over it at very low flow. I used a teeny tiny bit of dishsoap in the pool of water that was running through it and who knows how much it helped but, as I said, the rinse went quickly. Like under 3 minutes.
All in all, I think the colors came out very pure, very vivid. I don’t particularly care for this color combination but that is not what this hank was about.
I do think it will make a very fun pair of socks though!
This is not a how to on dyeing yarn, by the way. I just thought I would share my tidbit of information.