Food or icing dyes (Wilton’s is often mentioned) will be stronger and perhaps less fugitive.
PAAS Easter Egg colors, dyeing according to box instructions, with white vinegar and microwaving, of merino/cashmere/angora. Each tablet did roughly two swatches (a couple double/triple dipped) in the standard custard cups. I hadn’t used food-safe dyes before; these are to compare and contrast with my usual commercial ones.
Swatches freshly joined and several years later.
Food-safe dyes are a good, safe way to play around (particularly with kids) but you need so much dye for any amount of yarn that it isn’t a cheap way to go.
Dyeing a pattern into raw yarn:
My samples (I gave it two shots) were as small as possible: cast-on of 28 stitches and size 1/2.5 mm needles. The pears would have had cleaner edges if the tubes were bigger, but the size of the dyed loops and the time to rework it were against this.
My gauge is consistent, but I couldn’t get the reknitting to align. Miscounted the cast-on? When the second had the same problem, I realized the yarn had shrunk in the dyeing. Changing the number of stitches in the cast-on after frogging, or changing the needle size worked. Fuss, fuss, fuss. Start with pre-treated yarn!
If this technique were used for a pair of socks, the shapes would appear correctly ONLY if the knitter had exactly the same gauge.
Corrected sequence: pretreat a length of yarn so that blooming/shrinkage has happened. When dry, knit a tube of the undyed yarn. Use permanent markers to draw the pear (even very fresh/wet markers didn’t penetrate the yarn well). Unravel the tube and separate the color sections with ties. Open into a big loop and re-tie after adding additional yarn (I did two more loops and added two loops’ worth of hot pink yarn to separate the motifs). Hand-paint the dye into the sections (do not remove the ties until all are done). Reknit. Photo at right shows first trial, knit, and second dyeing attempt.
First attempt, second; second steeked to show all three images. The more-orange pear in the first set came from the dye bleeding into that section of the loop.
Bacon and Egg Booties, Test Knit for Kathie Popadin:
Figured out (from a previous test knit of the same size) how much yarn would be needed for each color, rounded it up, weighed it out, skeined it up and butterfly-tied it. It’s in its overnight vinegar-salt soak.
- Raw yarn measured/weighed out for two booties
- Colors chosen (it took several tries for the yolks)
- Yarn sectioned for cream body color, yolk yellow, bacon cuff
- Bacon divided for lean and streaky
- Dyed yarn
- Bacon split in two balls (doubled balls are always left connected until the project is completed – this saves effort trying to guess where “half-way” is.
Malabrigo Rios yarn dyed for my next pullover. It turned out that although the raw skeins looked the same, they were processed in different batches so took the color slightly differently.
When you need to hang yarn to dry it out, it goes faster and better if you add a wick. If you don’t have a handy end at the right place, loosely tie on a strand of something else.