Yarn Dyeing into the Wee-Hours

I just returned to Nashville from a week-long trip home to visit family and friends.  I’m still getting back in the swing of things, but being that my blog has been dormant the whole time I was gone, I thought I’d show you one of the things I did while I was at home!

Yup, we decided to dye some yarn.  Real dyeing, not the Kool-Aid I’ve attempted in the past.  Mom had six hanks of sock yarn and a flat sock blank, and I brought two skeins of sock yarn and two lace weight to dye.

We started this project around 6 p.m. Monday evening after running all over Erie finding the supplies we needed.  (Keep this in mind…)

Mom went crazy ordering acid dyes in all sorts of colors.  We had thirteen different ones, plus mom mixed some of her own shades of purple.

Here we’re pre-soaking the yarn in a couple huge bucket-things mom had in the basement.  I told her we should have put them on the floor to stomp in them like Lucy!

… and there I am pretending to know what the heck I’m doing!  Attempting the dyeing process yourself gives you a whole world of appreciation for all the indie dyers out there.  It also gives you blue thumbs if you’re “lucky” like me and discover a hole in your rubber glove too late into the process.

When it came time to steam our yarn, we repurposed an old pressure canner my mom had.  (Actually, we discovered she has four pressure canners in her basement. Seriously.) We took out the jar rack, bent the handles so it would hover higher out of the boiling water, and it worked perfectly!

I hung the last of this yarn in the basement at 5 a.m. Tuesday morning.

Yes, you read that correctly: we started dyeing at 6 p.m. Monday night, and finished at 5 a.m. Tuesday morning.  Think we learned our lesson!

Even better, I fell into bed about 5:30 a.m., slept till 9:30 a.m., then spent my day saying goodbyes and had to take a 7:00 p.m. flight back to Nashville which didn’t land till 9:50 at night!  It was a LONG DAY.

… But SO worth it!!