Ok, I’ll admit it…this was a major undertaking to do all this yarn at once! For a first project, anyway. But overall I think it went rather well!

Initial thoughts – I was terrified of felting. I did everything I could to prevent this. I think the yarn needs to dry before I know for sure! Also, buying a black pot made it difficult to tell the colour of the dyebath. But on with the story!

The before shot of the supplies:

The yarn as it was soaking – you have to wet it completely before you add it to the dyebath, otherwise it won’t take properly!

Then I added the powdered dye to the big pot of water I had heating up – I later stirred it of course!:

With the yarn now added to the pot (look how much higher the water got!) I had to measure and add the vinegar:

And now, the timer was set for 30 minutes:

I checked on it a few times – was trying my best not to stir too much, lest there be felting. But at one point I saw that the dye wasn’t settling too evenly. There was some multi-tonal bits. They wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome, but I cautiously stirred anyway:

As I stirred, the wooden spoon was picking up some loose fibres. One of my worries was that there wasn’t enough vinegar added to make the dye stick. So I took those fibres and washed them with dish soap. The colour didn’t budge! See?:

Now that the time was up, it was time for the rinsing…the moment of truth! Well, almost…here it is in the smaller bucket. I decided to rinse the skeins out individually because there was a LOT of water/yarn to deal with. I gradually cooled the water off (to prevent felting!) by adding warm cups of water to the hot water, and periodically dumping some of the hot water out. You can see here that some colour was still bleeding out:

I pressed them out very carefully so as not to promote any felting.

Look, the colour isn’t coming out! Look how pretty it is!:

Then I hung them outside to dry:

I kept checking random bits of yarn to make sure it hadn’t felted. Some of it had clumped together, and there was a lot of fibre hairs that were stuck to other bits of yarn. But it all came apart if I pulled on it. I can’t see how it could be avoided…surely it’s the nature of the yarn to do this? Anyway, this is one of the sections I checked:

This is the spoon I used. It didn’t fare too well:

All seven skeins hanging together. Thankfully we had two plant hangers…and I managed to balance it all so that it could be hanging well over the edge of the deck:

They look wrinkly here. I’m sure this is going to be an absolute joy to wind:

I really don’t think it did felt at all, and it was really a lot of fun. Very satisfying, although a lot of freaking work! The colour came out pretty much exactly as I wanted it…a very deep blue. I had considered adding some black to make it more dusky, but I really wanted a nice jewel tone. I think I can cautiously call this project a success…but I will update when it’s actually dry!