| All pictures when clicked will bring up a larger lightbox image. |
| Prepare your yarn:- |
|
| Prepare your yarn for dyeing by hanking it into the length you want. This will determine how long your colour changes are.Soak hank in water/vinegar (I use 50/50) mix with a dash of wool wash. Make sure you’ve squeezed all the air out of the wool, or there will be places the dye won’t take as well. Leave for at LEAST 30 minutes. |
|
 
|
| Prepare your dyes:- |
|
| 100g of yarn will take about 20-30ml of liquid food colouring, 150ml of vinegar and 100ml of water so split up between your colours.You will need red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. I used Queens food colouring. I only had to make up the orange and purple, as you can buy the other colours off the shelf. I also add a little blue to my red, and a little red and green to my blue to deepen the colour. If you have black colouring, you could also use that.Prepare in sauce bottles.Don’t forget to wear gloves! |
| Dye your yarn:- |
|
| Gently squeeze excess fluids out of the yarn, you can reuse this mix for future dyeing. Lay yarn out on work surface (I use a melamine serving tray) so that the risk of cross dyeing is minimal. |
 |
| Starting at one end, slowly add red, making sure each squirt of dye mix is fully absorbed before adding more. This will prevent too much bleeding of colours. Saturate the end with colour, ensuring all the yarn is dyed. |
 |
| Next, taking the orange, blend colour in to the end of the red and saturate the next section the same way, ensuring each squirt of dye is exhausted before adding more colour. |
  |
| Repeat with the yellow, blending into the orange. |
 |
| Taking the green, squirt just away from the end of the yellow, pushing the dye back with your fingers, so the blend ends up a nice paler green. Then going forward, saturate yarn for the next section. |
 |
| Repeat with the blue, and then the purple, taking it to the end of the hank. |
  |
| Lay paper towel over your coloured hank, soaking up excess dye and fluid. |
 |
| Arrange hank in microwave steam dish, being careful not to allow colours to touch. |
 |
| Place lid on dish, and microwave on high for 2 minutes, allow to rest for 2-5 minutes, cook for another 2 minutes, rest, cook etc, Repeat until yarn has ‘cooked’ for 8-10 minutes. |
|
| Allow to cool completely, and then soak in cool water with some detergent for about 15 minutes. Squeeze excess water from hank, and hang to dry. |
 |
| Tah-Dah! |
 |
Fantastic! Looks great
March 10th, 2008 at 12:05 pmGreat directions. Thankyou
March 10th, 2008 at 3:40 pmThankyou so much for taking the trouble to show this so clearly and easily.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:54 pmMuch appreciated.
That looks great! I might have to give in and give it a go, now!
March 13th, 2008 at 12:33 pmHi Vintage Grrl,
March 19th, 2008 at 11:03 pmJust wanted to say thanks for a fabulous tutorial, which we were directed to in Ravelry. We used it to have our first go at dyeing some wool today!
My 10yr old daughter and i each dyed a 50gm skein and it was so easy and so so so much fun!
I am definitely addicted and cannot wait to try my hand at some more colour variations.
You can see our results on my blog site where i have credited and linked back to your tutorial.
Moving on from food dyes what brand of dyes do you recommend?
Awesome colours. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
March 26th, 2008 at 8:27 amHi Again,
April 11th, 2008 at 9:01 pmWe used your tutorial to encourage all the children in our homeschooling group to have a go at dyeing thier own wool. They had such alot of fun with it…
Children are great, they don’t think about the process as much as we do, they just do it and they created some amazing wool colours. Will be posting on my blog over the weekend!
Thanks again for your fabulous tutorial!x