Creative Weekend...

My weekend was:

1. Exciting

2. Exhilarating

3. Surprising

And lastly.

4. Slightly Frusterating

I decided to experiment a bit with dyeing yarn. I've had a couple yarn dyes in my craft room for a LONG time but I've been too chicken to try them out. I decided to buy a couple other colors and finally commit to dyeing some miscellaneous stash yarn that I've had forever.

1st up was winding a sweater sized ball if worsted weight yarn. It was a rediculous ball of yarn. Then I created 24 mini skeins weighing about 21.5g each.

Then I gave them a bath in Synthrapol. I was totally surprised how dirty the water was after.

Since I was dyeing small skeins it didn't make sense to use a dye pot for each. So I bought some large canning jars and decided to make a dye bath in each jar.

This was the exciting part :-)

I followed the jars directions and set them out to dry for the night. In the morning I did a test wash to see if there was any color leeching. Of course there was. I was beyond frusterated. 

I did some googling and tried out a couple methods. It still was leeching color in the bath like a mother ______. I was loosing my mind. 

The last effort was to go out and buy some Citric Acid. After a long hunt I was able to find some. It's not something every grocery store carries. You need to go to a specialty store (at least in my area). 

Then I did a bath of Citric Acid and Synthrapol. That did the trick. 

The colors came out dark but thats part of experimenting. Now I know to add less dye powder for the next time.

Sunday, I decided to try to handpaint a couple skeins of undyed sock yarn. That was FUN. I was totally surprised that when I put the blue dye on that it looked super light but when I steamed it the color totally transformed :-) it turned out how I hoped it would.

The last skein I had was a remnant skein and I just used whatever dye was left over. It's blah but I'll be able to use it for something.

Overall, it was an exciting and eventful weekend!!

Also I joined the BlogLovin Bandwagon. So if you'd like to follow me you can now follow me there :-)

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Happy Knitting :-)