Babby’s First Dye

Hello, world.

I am morally obligated as a programmer to start off with that. It’s tradition.

Welcome to the first blog post of my new blog, Dyelithium! It’s going to be a blog about yarn dyeing, but (secretly, or not so secretly as the case may be) it’s also about everything else I craft. So you will probably get a healthy dose of knitting, quilting, and crochet too, and maybe even some cross stitch or some other random thing I do with fiber. But it’s ostensibly about my adventures in learning to dye yarn.

Naturally I need to have actually dyed some yarn in order to have something to blog about. This is that post: babby’s first attempt at yarn dyeing. Which is technically true: this is my first time dyeing yarn. But not my first attempt at dyeing anything ever. I’ve tie dyed cotton T-shirts (among other things) on three separate occasions. I also did a fabric dyeing experiment for the science fair in middle school, which is actually an interesting enough story to merit it’s own post later.

Dyelithium was conceived when I told a friend that I was going to get into yarn dyeing, but because my tap water is extremely hard with iron, which interferes with dyes, I needed to do a series of experiments with different waters. And I needed to write down my findings, because it’s Science. Friend immediately suggested doing a blog, and I was like, “Yeah, ok. But I need a name, and it has to involve a pun, because all the best blog names involves puns.” And then we threw around some dumb dye and yarn puns for awhile before I decided it would be most excellent if we could figure out a pun that also referenced Star Trek. Thus Dyelithium was born.

But back to the premise, dye experiments. Originally I was very ambitious and planned to have the first post be the results of my whole initial dye experiments with the water. That plan did not survive contact with the enemy. The first dye session took me three and a half hours, and I did one color in one type of water. But it was definitely useful in working out the kinks, which is what this blog post is about.

The Experiments

I have 6 different colors of acid dyes from Dharma Trading Co, which I cannot remember at this time, but one of them is definitely True Turquoise, because that’s the relevant one here.

I also have 4 different kinds of water to test: distilled, my super iron rich tap water, spring, and tap water that’s been softened.

I have one of those very large skeins of Lion Brand Fisherman’s Wool in natural, which I then divided into 20 yard mini-skeins (which is so abysmally tedious to do that I got tired after doing 6 of them).

So all 6 colors, each in 4 different kinds of water = 24 test skeins.

The Method

I decided to start with True Turquoise in distilled water. Very quickly I realized that I needed to figure out how much dye to use, but what I lacked was any kind of reference for how much that might be. There’s a list somewhere on Dharma’s site that things like “we used this much for 1 lb of yarn”, which seems reasonable until you realize that these little mini skeins weigh 9 grams each – which is about a 1/3rd of an ounce. And there’s 16 ounces in a pound. Yeah.

The other major complicating factor is that I don’t have quite all the right equipment. I have a food scale, which is only accurate to 1 whole gram. I also lack any sort of pipette or syringe or graduated cylinder or basically any useful way to measure small amounts of liquids. Luckily the amount of water in the dye bath doesn’t really matter because the dye exhausts, but because my scale wasn’t accurate enough I had to do an intermediate step of mixing up a dye solution, and then measuring the proper amount.

Let’s get scientific!

Excuse the messiness of my set up. If these dyes get into the air and you breathe them in, it’s bad news. (Of course they’re safe from that once they’re in water.) Since I have animals in the house I decided it best to do this out in the garage on my broken dryer. What’s not pictured is the gloves and face mask I had on, which coupled with the fact that I clearly need a proper drug scale, made me feel very Breaking Bad indeed.

So what I did was pour 100g of water (yes, I weighed the water) into one mason jar, and then dissolve 1g of dye powder into that. Somehow I determined that the proper amount of dye to use for a 9g mini skein was 38g of this solution (so .38g of dye powder). I then spilled 2g worth of dye solution on the dryer and had to go back inside to get paper towels. Leaving me with 60g of dye solution left.

This was entirely too much dye.

In fact, it was about 3 times too much dye for a 9g skein. Which, of course, I only discovered when I couldn’t get the dye bath to exhaust.

Look at it. Vexing me.

So I took it out, and rinsed it all out and I threw another one in. And after 30 minutes it still hadn’t exhausted. So I threw a third skein in. Now, the first skein I took the trouble of doing everything right. I soaked it for 30 minutes in water with Dharma Profession Textile Detergent. The second skein I got wet with a little distilled water (I was running out of distilled water by this point) before throwing it in. By the third skein I was over it and I just popped that one in dry. As far as I can tell, it made no difference at all. They all look the same.

Finally.

The Conclusion

So I learned a few things from this experiment that I can improve upon in later iterations.

1. I need a drug scale and/or a pipette.
2. It took 3 skeins to exhaust 38g of dye solution, which means the amount required for each 9g skein should be around 12-13g of the dye solution. (Or .12g of dye powder.) At least for the True Turquoise color, but we will see if it holds up for the others.
3. Apparently pre-soaking in a detergent makes no difference? I’m not comfortable writing off the merits of detergent quite yet though. All this means is that this particular yarn didn’t really need to be washed

Anyway, that’s all. I did want to note that I did this back in January on the 29th, so it’s been a little while because I had to get my site hosting in order and all. Here’s one last picture of the first skein hanging.

Hang in there, kitten!