Jananas

I took a class this week at The Knit Cafe offered by the lovely Edie Kim on how to dye yarn and rovings using cake decorating dyes (i.e. non-toxic so you can use your normal cookware!). I won’t fill you in on all of the lovely little secrets, but you’ll get a general idea of the process. First up, I tried my hand at some rovings that I had – I figured that they’ll be more fun to spin with when there are pretty colours than when they are plain basic white.

First step – soak the fibers so that they’ll open up and accept the dye better.

While this was happening we started to get the dye baths ready. We did simple immersion baths. First up, yellow!

Next up, red! This looked really red in the pot, but once the yarn and rovings were pulled out and rinsed it was more of a bright, bright pink.

Finished product! My second attempt at dying was using some superwash merino sock yarn that I’d picked up a while back. We used teal and a rose pink, for a nice popsicle bright yarn. I also dyed over part of the rovings with the teal, all in the name of science and experimentation!

I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with the sock yarn as I don’t really enjoy knitting socks. However, I am super excited to spin up the rovings and see what happens to the colour changes (and how deeply the dye penetrated in – should make for some interesting variation).