Yesterday I dyed a sock blank. If you don't know what that is, it's a pre-knit fabric about 18 inches long and 9 inches wide. Two finger weight yarns held together and machine knit. So you can lay it flat and dye it, heat set it and let it dry, then you can knit your socks right from it. No hanking or caking or winding into balls. It's a very cool way to get just what you want when you dye yarn. If you want the yarn to stripe, you paint stripes on the fabric, if you just want it to be fun and variegated, you do what I did.
Heck you can paint a picture on the fabric, though when you knit it the picture won't come out. I started with a light sage green.
It's actually the darkest green color, but the pastel of it. Which means a lot of water and an ounce or so of full strength dye. That way there is no white showing if I don't get dye all over it.
Then I used the squeezie bottles and dripped, squirted, dribbled the medium sage green (I got that with Emerald and Brown Jacquard Acid dyes) all over the top, turned it over and repeated on the back. The dye doesn't always go all the way through the fabric, so make sure you turn it over if you are doing something like this. I use a LOT of dye to about 1 cup of water when I do this.
That way you don't have a lot of water wandering around the table after the dye is absorbed by the yarn.
This picture shows the back after the first pass of the medium sage green. The nice thing is you can use the fabric itself to wipe up small spills. The fabric will suck it right up.
After the darkest green went on it looked like
this:
I folded it up and put it into a quart sized baggie and did the microwave heat thing. The rinse showed no extra dye at all coming out. Which I really like since the dye that goes down the drain is money I wasted. The dye isn't expensive but I can't get it locally and that means I have to pay shipping and WAIT for it. You're a knitter, you understand how hard it is to wait for a package.After the rinse, I tossed it in the washer on spin to get all the extra water out and hung it to dry.
Luckily, here in CO, it dries so fast that I could cake it before I went to bed. :)
It's on Etsy now for $20. I named it Pesto.
Well, I will try to dye something today but the DH has me running around getting stuff for him today. And I do have to get ready for school tomorrow.
Have an awesome day and Happy Knitting and Crocheting!
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