An Easy Way to Dye Yarn – The Cuttle Corner #18

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Welcome to the eighteenth edition of The Cuttle Corner! We are doing something a little different this week and trying out an easy way to dye yarn.

If you missed last week’s post, you can take a look here.

Now, let’s get cozy!

What’s going on

Winter has set in. My area saw its first snowfall of the year, and we’ve had freezing temperatures all weekend.

With this perfect excuse to stay home, I’ve been working on some kitchen projects. I really like baking bread. I’ve had sourdough starters on and off, depending on what else I’ve got going on. Lately, I’ve been wanting to bake some sourdough, so I’ve been working on getting a new starter going. This one is ready to start baking bread next week!

I also save vegetable scraps and meat bones from whatever I happen to be cooking. Using some leftover turkey bones (that I still have another bag of in the freezer) I made a huge pot of broth. I’ll keep this in the freezer and pull it out when needed.

I never follow a recipe for broth or stock, I just throw in whatever I have on hand and it always turns out great!

What I’m working on

Knitting

All my knitting energy this week (which has been pretty low) has gone into knitting on my vanilla socks. I haven’t quite finished the first sock, but I’m almost to the toe.

With the cold weather, I always have a pair of hand knit socks on. I can never have enough!

I haven’t forgotten about my cardigan, but I’m between sections and haven’t gotten around to starting the next step.

Spinning

I always say I don’t like to spin yarn in the winter, but lately I can’t seem to keep my hands off of wool!

My Norwegian wheel returned to its rightful place in my craft room now that the holidays are over, so of course I needed to start a new spinning project on it.

A few weeks ago, I took myself on a little fiber field trip a visited a yarn shop I hadn’t been to before. I went to A Little Knitty and found some beautifully died Corriedale fiber that went perfectly with the Polwarth and silk fiber I already had.

After playing around with how to combine them, I settled on hand carding these two fibers together, and spinning them with a long draw on my Norwegian wheel. When the singles are done, I will make a two-ply yarn out of the singles. I have 11 ounces of fiber to play with, which will make quite a bit of yarn. I don’t think I’ll be able to fit all the singles on the bobbins, so I’ll probably have to spin and ply in batches.

Dyeing

I took my white mystery two-ply off the bobbins. I’m so happy with how this yarn turned out. Once I had it all skeined up, I measured it out. Out of just over 200 grams of wool (or whatever fiber it was) I spun about 570 yards.

For fun, I decided to go ahead and dye this yarn, since the white was the perfect canvas to dye on. A while back, I bought a wool tinctures dyeing kit from Abundant Earth Fiber, which is the same company I got the yarn for my Kildalton sweater. This is just about the easiest way to dye things! It comes with all the equipment you need to dye small batches of wool.

I was able to quickly dye up my handspun yarn into this beautiful dark green/teal color, which is the Woodland colorway. I tried to capture the color as best as I could, but all the pictures I took didn’t do the color justice. It is a much richer color in person.

One skein turned out a bit lighter than the other. If I use them both together, I’ll need to alternate skeins to help even it out. I also might over dye the lighter skein to have two distinct colors to work with.

What do you think? Should I keep the yarn as is, or do some more dyeing?

This was a really fun and easy way to dye wool for someone like me who doesn’t dye very often. If you want to play around with colors but don’t want to invest in a big dyeing setup, this is a great option. They have a lot of colors available and they are all beautiful!

Until next time, keep cuttle-ing!

What are you working on? I’d love to hear about your projects in the comments below!