I ended up making three different styles for this series:
A short repeating gradient interrupted with a solid color
A white base speckled skein
All skeins were hand painted (which is just a fancy way of saying I poured the dye on them just where I wanted), carefully wrapped in plastic wrap, and then steamed to set the dye. I only did one skein at a time due to the equipment that I had available and so that I could devote all my attention to each one.
This was the most complicated skein to dye due to the preparation that I needed to do to the yarn. in order to do a long gradient, you need to section the yarn up into smaller potions and apply varying strengths of dye to the yarn on each section. I used a pegboard with some dowels in it to wrap the yarn up in 8 roughly equal sized sections that were attached to each other. this was particularly fiddly and i had to take great care to not tangle the sections up.
Sadly, I didn’t end up taking pictures of this step, but I will be sure to do so next time!
Once each skein was wound into sections, i laid out a long strip of plastic wrap and spread the yarn out on top of it.
I pinched the plastic wrap up to made little divider wells between each section so that i could control where the dye went a little better as I was applying it.
I had already carefully mixed and arranged the dye in the order I wanted to apply it, so i just had to work my way down the line.
I carefully poured each of the dyes onto each segment. and squished them around.
Next I wrapped the whole thing up in the plastic wrap, and placed it into a pot with a steamer basket, put the lid on, and steamed it. I didn’t time how long I steamed it, I just kept taking it out and using tongs to squeeze it a little to see if the dye had exhausted.
once the dye had exhausted, I let the yarn cool, then carefully unwrapped and rinsed it in plan cool water.
It last thing i did was to squeeze the yarn out in a towel to remove the excess water, and hang it on a pegboard out in the sun to dry. It was carefully watched over by Pico!
Process: Short interrupted gradient
For the short interrupted gradient, I made sure to lay the loop out so that the two sides were far apart from each other. I then poured each color on one half of the skein. The dye bled a little more than I expected, and the color ended up going much further than intended. Next time I will probably use a thickening agent to do this effect. I had to wrap this one carefully so that the dye wouldn’t bleed to where I wanted to stay white, so I sandwiched it between layers of plastic wrap, and was very careful when i rolled it to keep the color at the bottom any time I moved it.
I didn’t take any pictures of applying the dye for the speced yarn, but I basically just used the straws that I mixed it with to dab colors randomly. Then it got wrapped up the same as the rest and steamed!
Posts in the Victuuri yarn series
Inspiration | Color Blending | Dyeing Process | FO
