Can you dye superwash wool

Knit Picks also has a wonderful selection of bare yarn for dyeing that fits every budget. Wool of the Andes my favorite is a lovely, soft yarn at a great price that dyes up beautifully. Plus, this yarn comes in a rainbow of colors so you can practice overdyeing some already-dyed yarn. Make sure to check their Clearance Sale Page! Paradise Fibers also has a very large inventory of undyed yarn in different weights and fibers. Lion Brand has a huge variety of yarn in natural fibers as well as synthetic.

Darn Good Yarn has exotic yarns such as recycled sari silk. Amazon always has a huge selection of any kind of yarn imaginable! Etsy is a great place to buy yarn straight from the farm!

Bluprint formerly Craftsy has lots and lots of cool yarn and tons of sales. I will update this information as soon as I get it. It is lots of fun to play with overdyeing colored yarn. For instance, alpaca fiber comes in various natural shades from white and off white to tan, fawn, brown, black and different shades of gray. My absolute favorite yarns are the silver gray skeins I overdyed with purple, red, blue and green, giving me lovely deep jewel tones.

Those skeins were always the first to sell at my fiber festivals! As stated previous, the type of dye to use depends on the fiber content of your yarn. Different dyes work with different materials.

Match the content of your yarn to the type of dye. Jacquard iDye Poly — use with Polyester and Nylon fibers. Well, yes you can. However, RIT Dyes are what is known as a Composite Dye , which means it has different dye types mixed together for various fibers. Rit Dye is, however, readily available and inexpensive. Food Colors are cheap and easy to come by. See my tutorial on Dyeing Yarn with Kool-Aid. As I said, if you are dyeing wool with Kool-Aid or food coloring , you can use whatever pots and pans you already have in the kitchen.

If, however, you will be using professional acid dyes for yarn, any utensils, dishes or pots will no longer be safe to use for food. Quick tip — check out your local thrift store for cheap roasting pans, stock pots or casserole dishes.

Stay away from aluminum, however, as that can affect the end result. This list is only a suggestion and totally customizable to your needs and budget. And, before you go out and buy a bunch of yarn dyeing supplies, please take a look around your house.

You might be surprised by what you already have that can be repurposed such as old ketchup or mustard squeeze bottles or craft brushes. NEVER use pots, pans, measuring cups etc. This will attract dry dye particles that may escape. There are many different methods for creating hand dyed yarn such as hand painting, kettle dyeing, speckle and submersion dyeing, etc.

With Hand Painting, you apply the dye onto the yarn directly by hand. It gives you control over the exact placement of the dyes and therefore the final look of your yarn. With this method, the dye will bleed somewhat, but not as much as with other dyeing methods. Hand Painting can be done with squirt bottles, cups or paint brushes. After applying the dye, the yarn is then heated to set the dyes.

See the step by step tutorial How to Hand Paint Yarn. The main difference in Kettle Dyeing is that the yarn is placed inside a pot, pan or kettle and the dyes are poured on in sections. See the step by step tutorial How to Kettle Dye Yarn. Basically, it is a hand dyed yarn that has a single or a few main colors with specks or dots of other colors. Kool Aid drink powder works great for this method. Look up how to dye cotton yarn for help. I have a? If you have already skiens of wool yarn, will heating them in the dyeing process shrink thee yarns.

Temperature shock will cause shrinking and felting. Crockpots work well for the gradual temperature change, though it takes a while. Only for the pre-soak phase. During the actual dyeing process you will need to add something acidic so that the dye adheres to the yarn.

I hope this helps! Web: Expression Fiber Arts. Previous Next. View Larger Image. So I had this genius idea. But here are some pictures of the event: The dye: The yarn soaking in the dye: And the finished product.

My options at this point in order of least preferable to most preferable are to: 1. Reduce the collections to 6 single shades each. Blah on this idea. I love dyeing yarn so very much! If you have never dyed yarn or have but are curious as to more options, here are some various ways you can achieve multi-colors in a skein as opposed to the skein being all one color : Essentially, you have to somehow apply the dye to the yarn and then heat set it.

Step 2: I put the water and dye into a bowl and stirred. You can add vinegar to the water if you feel the dye is not all soaking into the wool Step 4: I used tongs insulated gloves work too and placed the skeins gently into the sink, rinsed the bowl, added the new dye color and placed the opposite ends of the skeins into the bowl. Step 5: Then I just rinsed the skeins and hung to dry! About the Author: Chandi. Hi, I'm Chandi! I'm a self-professed lover of all things yarn. I'm an avid knitter, crocheter, wool dyer, fleece and roving spinner and occasional felter!

I offer beautiful, inspiring, hand-painted yarns and deliver the best of all yarn-related tutorials I can on my blog. Related Posts. Sylvia Wijsman September 24, at pm - Reply. Hello Chandi, Im new to the entire yarn world, but i fell in love with your work! Very curious about your response if you understood… my poor description. Chandi September 26, at pm - Reply. Brandi March 20, at am - Reply. Elizabeth D. July 21, at pm - Reply.

Mary Ellen January 1, at pm - Reply. Chandi January 11, at pm - Reply. Deborah March 8, at pm - Reply. Vicki Elster October 10, at pm - Reply. Most of the natural dyes can be easily applied to protein fibers, mainly for dyeing wool. Some may need a mordant, generally copper, alum, lead, or iron, but the problem is that they exhibit more toxicity when compared to synthetic dyestuffs. Anyway, these dyes are easy to remove with the best dye remover for clothes as most of them tend to make weaker bonds with the fabric.

The Lanaset dyes are the longest living, highly resistant to wash, several hand colors available in the United States for wool dyeing. The Lanaset coloring consists of a collection of both fiber reactive dyes and acid dyes, which are built for wool.

Like other wool dyes, Lanaset dyes is washable without fading badly in hot water. Often they are difficult to find in some countries. Vinyl sulfone dyes, also available as Remazol dyes, are mainly a class of fiber reactive dye, which is widely applied on silk. Like Procion MX colors, their application process is like true fiber reactive dyes, not like the acid dyes. Notice that they are marketed as:.

Vat Dyes Indigo also may also be applied for wool dyeing and various protein fibers dyeing. But you must avoid high pH that may degrade the wool. These dyes are applicable for protein fibers dyeing because acid dyes are available in their mixture.

The final color achieved may be faintly different than the expectation, and also the cost is higher as a high amount of dye is required. We experimented with a few available dyes that are made for dyeing protein fibers like wool. The following dyes performed the best in terms of or vibrancy, fastness, range of shades.

Read Our Full Review. To get your desired shade, you can follow our dye colour mixing guide. Just remember to check the self-shades first and adjust accordingly. There are no interchangeable dyes that can be used on wool dyeing. Some colorants need a slightly lower more acidic pH than others; using a pH that is too low or too high for your particular coloring will limit your dyeing efficiency. Upon choosing your dye, consider a recipe for wool-dyeing that specifies the specific kind of dye.

A lot of hand dyeing yarn processes exist for wool dyeing. Mainly wool is dyed in package or hank form. One common wool yarn dyeing procedure in hank form is given below. The name of the process is Short-Skein Hank dyeing. Dyed Wool Yarn and the Final Fabric. It seems that all dyes and pigments are colored because they usually absorb certain wavelengths of light.

Unlike a dye, the pigment is usually insoluble and does not have any affinity to the substrate. Many dyes may be precipitated with an inert salt to create a pigment from the water. Different animal fibers can be dyed in this same manner using similar dyes.

Fur from various mammals, alpaca, Mohair, cashmere, and angora are included in this category. Excellently it takes dyes. During dyeing, you should not boil it but maintain a slightly lower temperature for almost an hour so that the dye molecules can easily penetrate the fiber.

Generally, a temperature of not more than 82 degrees Celcius is suggested. We all know about shrinkage. Smartwool and superwash wool, for example, do not have shrinkage because they are chemically treated. Yet the wool fibers do not shorten in length themselves. Instead, the fibers become more and more tightly interlocked when exposed to heating and tension in water, with the scales that are available on the molecules of the fiber behaving like the ratchet teeth.

If preventing shrinkage and felting is necessary, you have to be careful not to agitate your wool when the wool is in the warm liquor. Stirring your dyebath frequently with cellulose fibers is required for avoiding uneven dyeing, but the dyestuffs and chemicals help wool to dye evenly without stirring,.

Be wary of sudden shifts in temperature. Just slowly raise and lower the temperature of your wool. Using Lanaset dyes, which are washfast, when dyeing wool that can be used later for deliberate felting.