Tea dyeing!

Sorry for not getting this one out for you guys on time... I managed to fall alseep with my computer in bed as I was about to start writing up my adventures with tea dyeing (so LAC members, please excuse me for just sitting there, silently all night).

So yes, tea dyeing adventures! I've been procastinating these last couple of days, doing yarn dyeing instead of making dishcloths that I really need to finish up by tomorrow... I've been wanted to do tea dyeing for a long time now, so I just jumped into it yesterday. I dug out three skeins of white (or "nature"), two of which were Safirgarn, a 100% new, pure wool and one Drops Karisma, 100% superwash wool.

With good help of my drying rack, I got them all winded up in loose skeins and tied up using some scrap acryllic.

I decided to try the three "main" tea types, black, green and herb. I got a bunch of tea, and I've stuffed a whole cabinet with boxes and bags of tea...to Bård's annoyanse. With this tea dyeing, I got to clean out the cabinet, sort through all my tea and clear out alot of them. Since I wanted to get a vibrant result as possible, I picked out a good bunch of tea bags for each type.

I didn't have too much green tea, so I ended up using some loose leafs for that.

I started with boiling up about 1 liter water (0,26 gallons), adding some vinegar to get the acid in there that binds the colors (I just poured some in, didn't mind to measure it up), and started to heat it up while adding the tea.

I let it sit for a while and when it started to boil, and the tea had soaked for a good time, I took the bags out and dunked the yarn in there.

When I had gotten it all cowered and soaked in tea, I took the teabags and put them on top of the yarn, letting it sit like this for about 15 minutes while it was barely boiling.
Turned the heat down, and let it again sit for 5-10 minutes before I removed the tea bags. The yarn I put in a plastic container after I drained most of the water out of it, to then cool down before I poured luke warm water over it, being careful to match the temperature of the yarn.

Looks like noodles, right?

Then I rinsed and repeated for the two others, it took some time, but I did get as vibrent colors as I could have gotten. Most of the tea I used was Lipton and pretty old so that may have killed the colors some. The green tea gave me a lighter beige color, which I was expecting from the black tea (which turned out warm, middle brown), but I can't complain too much on those two. The herb was more dissapointing though. I was expecting a more pink-ish brown color, but it ended up being more brown/grey. I also used the Karisma on that one, my favorite brand out of the two I used, so I wish I'd dunked that one in the black one instead.

The fun thing though, they all go really good together! I know for certain that I'll have to use these three together in a project some time!
They are more or less dry, so I'll probably get them winded up tonight

Bleached cotton yarn!

I'm having too much fun with yarn this weekend! I did a second dye on the Kool-Aid wool yarn, and I got it JUST like I wanted!

But I also started some other coloring this night! I poured concentrated bleach into glass jars and dipped cotton yarn in them! The effect is AMAZING! Can't believe the results!

Ok, so lets start from the beginning! I just remembered that I saw someone pouring bleach over cotton skeins this last summer and used the yarn for dishcloths. The person had used black yarn and the bleaching made parts of it brown-ish, made for a really cool effect.

So I dug out some cotton skeins, first in three colors, but I ended up using four so excuse me for not including the purple in this picture...it was taken before that decision...and I've allready plumped some of the skeins in bleach allready...

 

 The yarn I'm using is Bomull Sport, which is my favorite cotton to use for dishcloths. 100% cotton. sturdy and purdy!

Ok, so I wanted to try and make the skeins half and half in color, so I needed some kind of glass or plastic vessel so they could stand up right into the bleach. The best ones I could find I could find, wich was the empty glass jars from my Diamon Candle candles, and I could just fit two skeins into each jar! Perfect!

I poured about 50/50 water and bleach into the jars at first, not too much since I knew the skeins would fill them up and I didn't want to have bleach spilling out over the bathroom sink cause I had put too much in there... But stupid me forgot that the yarn is COTTON! WATER ABSORBENT! Stupid me! So I had to pour more and more bleach and water into the jars cause the skeins kept sucking up all the liquids! But I was surprised to see immediant results! The skeins switched colors in front of my eyes and it was beautiful!

The dark green got a gradient of orange, yellow and white, the purple got a beautiful gradient to hot pink, light pink and white, the turquoise turned white and the red turned orange-ish and white! So much fun! I let them sit for about 30 minutes, I could have taken them out maybe 10-15 minutes earlier, I let them sit so long cause I was afraid the bleach wouldn't reach the center of the skeins before I took them out and rinsed them out... I am SO pleased with the result!

 

These will become four fancy dishcloths soon enough!

Kool-Aid dyed yarn!

Ever since I heard this was possible, I've been eager to try it out, but sadly we don't have Kool-Aid here in Norway. Lucky for me, my friend Pickle decided to send me a bunch of packs to try out!

Even though I like the concept, Kool-Aid ain't the thing for me it seems like. The few I've tasted so far haven't been all too good. I haven't tried them all yet, so I might like some of them, I just gotta get to actually try them... But still, there was some that I didn't like, and since I got multiple packages, I decided to use some of them for yarn dying!

So, last night, after watching a bunch of videos about the prosess, I decided to give it a go! Now, I didn't have much white yarn to choose from, so I took two skeins of beige, thinking that I could maybe use it for socks later on. These are Trysil Garn Superwash from Europris. I chose superwash just in case. I don't trust pure wool in warm water no matter how little I'm going to touch it.
The important thing to remember when dying yarn is to use animal fibers. The colors won't stick to synthetics. While cotton and bamboo is natural, they still won't suck up too much of the colors, so the best way is the animal way; wool, alpaca, merino, mohair. Another thing, blended yarn will only partly get colored. If you're trying to dye a 70% wool, 30% nylon yarn for an example, the nylon strands will not get colored, while the wool fibers will, and it may give a cool effect.

I decided to try the cake method. Usually you want them in loose tied skeins to get the color as evenly spread as possible, but I saw this one woman using yarn cakes to get an uneven color through the skein, which I think gives a pretty effect. I winded up the two skeins and tied them up with some acryllic yarn just in case.

To get the color all through the skein, I put them in room temperature water for about 20 minutes. Usually with yarn dying, you want to add some vinegar to the water at this point, or else the color wont stick very well. But since Kool-Aid is so danged acidic allready, it's not needed here.
After a good soak, I put the cakes in a microweave safe container.

As colors, I decided to blend several Kool-Aid flavours just to test things out. I was dying two skeins and they weren't all white, so the color needed to be more intense. I've allready made a test chart of the colors I had avilable, and decided to go for a mix between Tropical Punch and Strawberry. I had half a package of Tropical Punch lying around so I used up that one first. Thinking that it wouldn't be enough color, I had a package of Black Cherry at hand for the second round of dying, just in case.

First I added water to the box containing the cakes, I covered them about 3/4 or so. Then I mixed out the Kool-Aid in a different container, just to see the color, before I  poured it over the cakes. And the yarn sucked up the color IMMEDIATELY! Even before I could stick them in the micro, the skeins were blood red and the water was getting clear allready! Crazy stuff!

I covered the box with some plastic foil and put the timer on 2 minutes at the warmest level. Then I checked the water, stirred a little and let the yarn rest for a few minutes before I zapped them again for another 2 minutes.

After four times in the microwave, the water still wasn't clear, but after another time, I figured that it probably wouldn't get clearer. I used crazy vibrant red color, so I shouldn't expect it to get all clear. But usually, you know your yarn is finished dyed when the water turns clear.

Then I let the cakes sit in the water until it had cooled, before I took them out and washed them up with some mild soap. Do not let the yarn go from warm to cold water too fast. It will shock the fibers and the yarn will felt.

After a good rinse, I squeesed out as much water as possible before placing them on a towel to soak up some more of the moisture. Afterwards I let the air dry over night.

As you can clearly see in this last picture, the dye didn't go through all of my yarn...which I originally didn't want, but I still want some more color than this. Right now, the yarn is self striping pretty much. So I rolled both skeins up to a cake again and I will try to dye them again with the Black Cherry one to hopefully get ridd of more beige that way.

I will keep you posted on that matter though, but for now, I think this blogentry has been long enough... See you all next time around!