Kettle Dye your Balls

Hi all,

I'm trying out a cool new technique that I found in "Yarns to Dyed for" by Kathleen Taylor.  What fun!  She give al sorts of information on how to dye yarns for specific projects.

This is "Immersion Dyeing for Graduated Bands of Color" big name for something that is fairly easy.

Bring a BALL of yarn up to a simmer in your kettle.  Make sure this is a ball done on your nostepinne.  I used a center pull ball, when she specifically said not to, and pulled the yarn from the outside.  Which was all well and good until I got closer to the center.  Then the other end popped out and an unholy mess ensued  Take it from me use a BALL!!

Above is the ball simmering in Strawberry dye, and you can see where my end is draping out as I let the dye soak into the yarn.  I used a Superwash Falkland fingering weight.  I was hoping that the superwash would dye quickly, because it drinks up dye like a Irish sailor drinks up beer, but that wasn't the case.  It still took me the better part of 2.5 hours to get this done.

I'm not using my niddy noddy as you can see.  I could have because it is teak but this worked out better for me.  Allowing the the water to drip into the sik between pulling. and keeping the yarn under relatively even tension.  I got this swift from the Auction at Maryland Sheep and Wool.

As the yarn comes off ou can see how the colors are changing each time I add more dye.  The green portion seems to be the largest.  I was going to dye the last part black but decided it wasn't necessary.

Here is the dry skein all pretty and waiting to have its picture taken and put into the shop. 

All in all a pretty cool new technique.  The next one I think will be a variation on a theme.  Bouncing back and forth in between two like colors to see how that will look.

This skein can be purchased from our shop on Etsy.  Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Knitting.....
DD