Dyeing my own yarn????

It's true. I've learned how to dye my own yarn. Granted, I don't if I'm yet prepared to try a solo mission, but with the help of the lovely and talented Jay of Jennifer Joy Creative, I've begun to hand dye my own wool!

There are a couple of different ways we did it. Jay knows the specifics of what to soak the plain wool in and how and when and for how long. I just followed her instructions.

First, Jay had taken the three kinds of wool I bought -- I had 1,000 yards each of two worsted weight wools and one bulky wool. She bound them off into roughly 200 yard skeins (aka balls of yarn!) with some sort of whacky wooden contraption:



Then we got to work. For the self-striping yarn, the skein was divided into four equal sections, each of which were placed in a jar with red, dark grey, light grey and plain water (to retain the ivory) and placed in a pot of boiling water.

Observe:




For a different method, we mixed our dyes with water in jars and transferred them into squirt bottles. First up on my agenda was magenta-orange-brown-ivory. It's true. I wanted to do that combination. Anyone who knows that my standard (and generally only) colors in my wardrobe are those in the self striping yarn (well, black is in there too with the grey and red), likely are shocked by this.






Anyway, so off went in our various color combos. Everything from earthtones like terra cotta and mahogony to bright purples and teals. And we came up with some pretty good stuff, if I do say so myself.



We hung most of it by the fire place to dry and Jay got to untangling the self striping yarn (we better come up with a different method...) When all was said and done, I think we came up with some pretty sweet yarn and I can't wait to do more.

Here's the finished product, available for sale on my Etsy site.