I’ve been admiring the beautiful colours of gradient dyed yarns that other dyers have been doing for some time now. I knew in theory how to do it I just hadn’t gotten around to having a go. So I decided it was time to have a go.
This is what I did:
First I took a 200g ball of wool and made it into 10 mini skeins of 20g each. I had my digital kitchen scales nearby so that I could weigh now and then and be aware once 20g had been wound off. I wound the yarn around my left hand and elbow, so they were only small skeins, each still joined to the next.
Then I soaked them all together in warm water with a drop of dishwashing detergent added. In this photo (below) there are 2 x 200g skeins soaking but in 2 different tubs…what a nightmare it would be to try to untangle them if they got mixed together!
Next is the fun part…getting the colours organised. I happened to take photos of my blue to brown gradient so that’s what I’ll show you in this blog entry.
Note the very important cup of tea :)
I laid out 10 containers and then organised my colours. I used 2 different browns and a lighter version of each brown. Then 3 blues with a lighter version of each of each blue. I mixed the colours a bit in the hope that they would blend nicely. Browns are at the left side in this pic blending to light blue in the middle then to dark blue.
You can do any colour arrangement that you like the look of at this stage.
Next I squeezed the excess water from the mini skeins, untangled them from each other and put each one in order above a tub of colour on the table. Once I was sure I had them not tangled, and all in the correct order, I picked each one up and plunged it into the tub of colour. I let them sit there for a while and I even fiddled with the colours by adding more colour or mixing to make the shades of colour slightly different.
Ok, next is a fiddly bit involving 10 little plastic bags. I used glad snap lock bags. I spread out 10 bags, one on the table above each tub of wool soaking in colour. I wash and reuse the little bags as many times as possible. I then started at the left and took the first mini-skein out of the colour and put it into the little plastic bag. I did this all the way along, leaving them open so that the steam created when they were heated wouldn’t pop the bags. Then I gathered each bag of coloured wool and put them all into the one big plastic container ready to go into the microwave.
This photo shows the container I use, and I forgot to say that I often cover the container with a bigger plastic bag to keep more heat and steam in with the wool.
So I put the whole lot into the microwave and set it for 3 minutes on high and pressed start. Then I set the timer on my stove for 30 minutes. I like to give the wool a good 30 minutes to take the colour even though I don’t microwave it continuously for that amount of time. I just keep checking on the wool to make sure it gets hot enough and then I close the microwave and let it sit in its own steam. Sometimes I’ll add another couple of minutes if I think it hasn’t got hot enough, or if it is cooling too soon.
After the buzzer on the stove goes I take the whole lot out of the microwave and with care not to burn myself I plop all the little bags into the sink and run some warm water into the sink.
You could do this individually with each little bag of wool just to be sure that if there is any run off of dye that it doesn’t contaminate one of the other colours.
Once they have all been rinsed, and are cooling, they can each be squeezed out and then hung out to dry.
I use my washing machine to give the whole lot (without the bags) a quick gentle spin so that they dry more quickly. I only do this with certain wools as I know they can take this sort of handling without felting.
I had such fun doing this and was really pleased with my first few tries at dying gradients.
Here are a few more pics:
