Drive-by-dye

[fallingbooks]

I dyed!



I crockpotted 2 skeins of white Full O' Sheep (hey, I never said it didn't have it's uses, and JoAnn's does have fabulous coupons on occasion,) dyed one side green (2 packs of green Koolaid, 4 cups water, flipped 'em, dyed the other side, dipped out some spent water, (we were seriously starting to head into overflow,) and then sprinkled blue all over both sides. Voila!, 300 yards of I don't know what. Smells tasty.

Tonight I did some really bad things to a braid of romney. I'm gonna pretend it never happened, seriously. I don't even think overdyeing will save it. In the interim I'm going to spend tome time studying color theory and try to figure out how the freaking heck to tie top/roving up so it doesn't get all drifty.

Comments

[seryn]

If the romney is still decent wool, you can always overdye with black. It hides a multitude of sins.

Roving doesn't like being swished around. There are some methods which accomodate this, like coiling it into the crockpot and using triple-strength dye (which pretty much requires real dye, which means you can't use the crockpot for food again ever.) There are people who swear by putting their superwash top into the legs of dead pantyhose. I figure at that point I'd rather pay someone else to dye it.

I did not have good luck with my kool-aid plus food coloring dripper bottle results after the top was spun. I'd attempted to overdye some purchased yellow SW top and it looked fine. There was even good dye penetration after it was dry, when I split it open with my fingers to check. But the final yarn is a lot yellower than the dyed wool looked.

If you're on Ravelry, there are several communities that talk about dyeing and how to rescue something that might look unsalvageable.

[seryn]

Also. I found via semtex http://www.colr.org/

That might be of interest for your color theory experiments.

[fallingbooks]

Cool, thanks! I am in a bunch of the Rav dyeing groups, mostly lurking around and and hitting all the threads that look relevant. I tend to be one of those hardheaded types that needs to have a few disasters before asking for help out loud, (I swear it's genetic,) but the couple folks I've talked to about this over there have been Super-helpful. :)