Happy Valentine's Day

In honor of Valentine's Day, I'm bringing you color! SO and I spent the better part of Saturday dyeing some of the suri alpaca yarn I bought last weekend.

Here's what we started with. This was a Craigslist purchase and while the seller didn't know how much she really had, it turned out to be 52 skeins of undyed suri alpaca/merino mix. Very smartly, SO pointed out that we should separate a few skeins into smaller amounts to experiment with for the great dye project so I didn't cut too deeply into my stash.






In anticipation of this great day, I had previously bought about a half dozen commercial wool dyes in red, blue, yellow, green, pink and black. To get the hang of the process, we mixed up some of each color except black. I did mix up a dark purple too just to try mixing the colors. The first go round involved making solid colors of what we had mixed:









Pretty!!!









Next we tried a technique that was supposed to give gradations of color but that didn't work out so well and we ended up with yarn the color of blue jeans -- ok, but not what we were trying for!











And, then we accidentally cooked some yarn to the point where it was crispy, crunchy and burnt. So, we learned that we needed to have more moisture when applying heat to set the dye.












Finally, yesterday, I switched gears and dyed 7 mini skeins with KoolAid which actually worked pretty good. Below is my Valentine's bouquet and if you look at the yarns on top (light blue, orange, light cherry), that's the Kool Aid yarn. Dyeing with Kool Aid was fun and very safe and less stinky!