Quick Overdye Experiment

Quick Dye Experiment
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

I have left-over yarn. It is from a project that is one of my very few "UGH!!"s as far as knitting goes. I probably shouldn't have knit it in the first place, but I got sucked into the excitement of a Knit-a-long. I bravely altered the colors the designer had chosen and came out with a decent bag.. that I'll never use. And I'm left with yarn in colors that simply don't speak to me at all.

I like electric blue well enough. But its eye-burning nature in quantity is not particularly appealing. I've been considering knitting the Dumpling Bags from Interweave Knit's Fall 2008 issue (amusingly enough by the same designer as my failing KAL experience). But I'd hate to throw yarn I don't like at a project that could be cute.

It occurred to me that there is no reason at all my yarn has to stay colors that I hate. I have dyes. I have containers. I have a microwave dedicated to dying.. I can overdye the yarn!

To decide what direction I wanted to take, I grabbed up some of the scraps of eye-burning blue that were left over from the previous project. Lucky me.. there were exactly four scraps already. And I had four colors I wanted to try.

Seen here, there are pre-mixed solutions of Jacquard acid dyes in Emerald Green, Purple, Periwinkle and Turquoise/Navy mix. I added a plastic spoon's worth of vinegar and a plastic spoon's worth of dye mixture to each of four small containers and the soaking yarn. I popped them all in the microwave "until they got hot", let them sit a couple of minutes and then rinsed everything down the drain (except the yarn!).

It wasn't an exact experiment. I just wanted to see if I liked the blue overdyed with any of these colors. If I want to get a precise depth of shade, I'll have to be more exacting. But right now, I rather like the look of the Periwinkle overdye (bottom left). It gives me a solid working idea for later.

Now I just need something that will fix the Tangerine yarn...