Color experimentation

I inherited a huge stash of yarn from a member of Stitch 'n Bitch Utrecht (spring cleaning). Part of the stash were various bits of unknown white yarns (well, various bits of a lot of unknown yarns). I decided to try dyeing them with food coloring (since I'm in the Netherlands, I don't have easy access to Kool-Aid). I decided that I wanted three sections of color: one blue, one yellow, and one green. This is what the soaking looked like ^.

I made a mixture of vinegar water at a ratio of 1/4 cup vinegar to a quart of water and added the dyes to different containers. After soaking the yarn in normal water for about half an hour, I placed them into the dyes and let them soak.


One of the skeins of yarn took up the color quite nicely, resulting in pastels. I rinsed the yarn out until the water was more or less clear. Then I put it in a 100-degree-Celcius oven for 10 minutes to set the colors and then let it hang dry over night. Here's what it looked like pre-ball winding:

and post-ball winding:











The other skein did not take the color up so well, so I let it soak over night. In the morning, I rinsed it out... The night soaking didn't help much. It must have a much higher synthetic fiber content then the other one (but since they were both mystery yarns, I know a bit more about them as a result of this experiment! ;-) ) I'm still waiting for it to dry, so pics of it will be up some other time.

Now, I've got a third skein soaking. This time with just two colors, though. As you see in the first pic, the blue and green seeped into the yellow... It ended up becoming brownish, so I threw it out. This third skein will be green on one side and turqoise-ish on the other (okay, so quite a bit of the green seeped into the blue). Can't wait to see how it turns out! (btw, I think this has a higher wool content than the unfortunate yarn, so hopefully it'll absorb the colors more readily... We'll see!)