Thou, Nature, art my goddess...

The Zesty Lime slub created at home with food colouring.

As promised from last week I did indeed take home some yarn and armed with the two tutorials that I posted I thought it was prudent to test the hypothesis of "dying yarn at home is a doddle".  I took home a 200gm skein of a new wool slub (coming to Naked Skeinz very, very soon), 2 balls of Heritage Polwarth Ecru and a ball of Silver Lining Clifton Stone.

This is what I started with - a mixture of smaller balls and a skein of  Naked slub.

I chose 50gm balls, as I thought this was a great way for me to test the principles without committing to a larger skein.  I also wanted to see the difference the outcome was on a natural cream colour versus a natural oatmeal shade.  The first step was to skein off the balls.  I have a niddy noddy at home, but this can be easily done with wrapping the ball between your hand and elbow.

A collage of the process from soaking, colouring and the finished product

I chose Turmeric for the small skeins and food colouring for the slub (the slub was made with machine washable fibre, so best suited to the food colouring).  Following the processes in the tutorials I was totally amazed at how simple and straight forward it was.  I preferred using the food colouring, I used just green and yellow colouring.  It produced more intense colours and less mess.  It was also a shorter process, just soak, dip/soak in colour and vinegar solution and zap in the microwave few a few minutes to set the colour.

The turmeric took a little more washing & rinsing, but still great results.

The turmeric took more dedicated washing because it I needed to remove the powder from the yarn, however if you used natural colours in liquid form, like beetroot juice, you wouldn't have that hassle.
I was so encouraged with the success of the experiment I then dug out a part come of natural ayrn I had in the back of the stash cupboard and skeined it off to have another go.

Not bad for ninety minutes work.

This time I limited myself to black & yellow food colouring playing around with differing dilutions of the black and then pouring over a mixture of yellow just before microwaving.  The effect was unexpected and pleasing, and I guess that is the entire key to doing it yourself at home.  Having fun, playing about and being happy with the results, regardless of how unexpected!

My second attempt using food colouring - using just black & yellow.

To win a Mystery Pack of Naked Skeins yarns - make sure you post your attempts of home dying.  You can do this on the thread at our Facebook page or Ravelry Thread.  The prize will be drawn in the first week of August.