As part of our crafts we enjoy with our homeschooling days, we decided it would be tremendous fun to do a sun dye… First we soaked our undyed Merino yarn in vinegar water, I had about 3 litres of water to 1 cup of vinegar. We let the skeins soak for about 20 minutes.
Then we squeezed the vinegar water out of the skeins.
We used nice large glass jars with screw top lids for the dyeing. Fill just under halfway with warm water and add a little vinegar too. Then place your skein into the water until it is fully submerged.
We used food colouring for our dyes. Erin chose a few colours, green was one of them. Above she is pouring the colouring into the glass jar, just a little at a time and then change to another colour. I usually use a metal spoon and gentle move the yarn about so that the colouring reaches different areas of the yarn, then quickly add another colour and move the yarn again so that a lovely varigation of colours can form.
Cadien’s sun dye on the left and Erin’s on the right. Once the colouring has been added, we put the lids on the jars and carried them outside to a really warm spot. We left them there for most of the day. The sun really heats up the water to almost boiling…
Kye said he would like to sit with his jar and watch it , so he found a spot right next to his blue jar, and he did… (He wanted to dye his yarn blue like Pelle, from Elsa Beskow’s book Pelle’s New Suit ).When you are finished, fill up a sink with cold water, bring the jars inside, open the lids and let the water cool down in the jars. Then take out the skeins gently and place them into the sink water to rinse. Rinse gently until there is no more colour run off and then hang them up to dry outside.
This is the end result! Caiden’s on the left, Erin’s is the green and the blue is Kye’s. They are quite varigated from the twists in the skeins and should knit up beautifully… This was such a wonderful experience for all of us…
