Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Dye-lemma

Moving on to stage two of the experimental yarn dyeing. It's not going so well.

I am trying to make self-striping yarn (see here and here). I am not worried about the length of the stripes at this point, since the experiment is mostly about color. So I took three kitchen chairs, made the biggest triangle I could with them in the kitchen and wrapped the purple-dyed yarn around. Retied the yarn at the three points, soaked it, and strung it into separate containers.

Then I added 1/3 cup of prepared Kool-Aid dye to each container, filled the rest of the way with water and started microwaving.

Now, several nuke/rest cycles later, the grape/purple container has completely exhausted, while the blue and the green both look like they have a ways to go. The purple had the most yarn in it; the green had the least.

Do I keep nuking and hope they exhaust? Will this ruin the purple?

Do I assume they have absorbed all the color they can and that's it? The blue is close to what I wanted; the green is nowhere near what I was hoping for.

What to do, what to do?

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