Mixed cotton fiber bleaching!

I just wanna dip all my wool in Kool-Aid and all my cotton in bleach! Yarn dyeing are addicting!

But I thought I should do some more research on the matter of cotton bleaching. As we allready know, bleaching works best on cotton cause it doesn't break down the fibers nearly as easily as it does with wool, cause with wool, the fibers gets destroyed. Acryllic doesn't change much at all in bleach, and lets be honest here, acryllic yarn suck anyway.

But after my test with the 50/50 bamboo and acryllic yarn that I did earlier, I decided to test out some of my other cottons that's mixed in fibers. I pulled out two skeins of Drops <3 You 1 which was a limited edition cotton yarn from Drops Design almost two years ago, 50/50 cotton and polyester micro. It sold out super fast and it was just about the cheapest cotton I've ever bought. In return, it's not THAT great to work with cause it splits way too easily, but it worked fantastic as dishcloths. I still got 5-6 skeins left in red and blue, so I decided to test with one of both colors.

The other yarn I decided to test out was Tuva from Trysilgarn, 50/50 cotton and acryllic. This is one of the most popular brands for dishcloths over here. Personally, I still prefer just about anything that's 100% cotton over these.

So I plopped two of each brand into bleach two days ago. I checked in on them every 15 minutes for an hour before I gave up and let them sit over night. There was just about no change on them, which didn't surprise me really.
I let them sit for just about 20 hours before I pulled them out and rinsed them off, and while being wet, only two showed any change in color, the red Drops <3 You and the blue Tuva. While I was rinsing them off, the red Drops <3 You bleed like a maniac! Every time I squeesed that particular skein, the water turned pink.

 

 

After I was done rinsing them all off and put them to dry, the blue Drops <3 You started to show some change in the colors too. The more it dried up, the more change it showed.

The green Tuva on the other hand, hardly showed anything. It had a slightly lighter hue on one end, but that's about it. Not even visible on camera. So just for the sake of experimenting, I poured a little more bleach, concentrated this time, and dipped the end of the green skein in. Mind you, I've been using a 1/3 bleach to water ratio so far.

Second round of experimenting!

You may remember the experiment I did with bleaching on bamboo/acryllic yarn? And you may also remember the not so good results I got from that?

Well, now I've finished up a second round of experimenting. Over a week ago, I bought a new bottle of bleach and decided to try new yarn in a 50/50 water and bleach sollution instead of the 1/10 I did on the other experiment. I plopped in two more strands of the yarn and let it sit over night. Sad about the same result as the first round, I didn't even bother to take them out! Over the next week, I noticed small changes in the colors every day, until I took them out last night, after being soaked for one week in bleach.
It's still not white, and it takes too long for a good result, not to mention that the fibers must be very weak at this point... So I doubt I'll be able to do it with this perticular yarn.

But I still got a huge amount of this yarn lying around, so I might just knit up some kind of light sweater with it anyway.