By now I'm sure you all know that I love unraveling thrift store sweaters. It's the least expensive way of getting one's grubby little paws on huge quantities of luxury fibers like cashmere and silk, and is enormously fun. It's also a good way for me, as yet uninitiated in the knitting of sweaters, to get a firm grasp on the mechanics of them. By unraveling them, I understand more about how they're put together, so that I might be better able to put one together myself one day. But that's a story for another time. Back to the sweaters as a whole.
Every time I go to the thrift store, I can't resist rifling through the sweater racks, scoping out fiber content and examining seams. More than once however, I've passed up some nice luxy fibers because they were a dreadful color. Now, when I started unraveling, I already knew one could dye yarn with KoolAid and/or food coloring, but it didn't stop me from leaving these awful-colored sweaters on the racks. Why? Because I was scared. Dyeing intimidated me like little else fibery has, even if it was just with KoolAid.
A little later I decided to at least consider it. All I did, though, was consider it. I thought about wanting to dye yarn for months and months. And then it happened.
On my last trip to the Goodwill, I found a scrumptiously soft cabled sweater in a nice hefty gauge made completely of merino. Orange merino. The kind of orange you get when you mix primary red and primary yellow. Orange and I have never had a good relationship, in spite of the fact that my hair is a coppery red at the moment. I couldn't resist a heavyweight merino though. Not when nearly every sweater in my frog pile is lace or cobweb weight. As I'm standing in line waiting to pay for my heap of orange woolliness, I think to myself, "You KNOW you're gonna hafta dye this, right?" And so began the working up of my nerve.
I've had the sweater for about two weeks now and it's been practically singing a siren song at me from the stashbox. I finally got up the nerve to pick up a bunch of KoolAid at the grocery store the other day, and so I made up my mind to frog the sweater this weekend and dye up a test skein. And that is exactly what I did.
Today, I frogged one sleeve and the turtleneck of the dreadful orange sweater that's been taunting me. Then I took the skein I had wound on my little niddy noddy, gave it a careful and gentle shampooing (it IS, after all, hair), mixed up a dye bath of Black Cherry KoolAid and went right on ahead with it.
At first, it didn't seem quite as deep a red as I wanted it to be. The color had exhausted itself, like it does, but it needed more. So I took another packet of Black Cherry and just sprinkled it in, stirring the yarn gently and carefully as I did. This has had an interesting result, as the yarn that was on the bottom of the pot is lighter than the yarn that got sprinkled more directly. Anyway, I cooked the yarn for a few minutes, until the color was once again completely exhausted (and I do mean completely), left it to cool, and then, when it was cooled to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I rinsed the newly reddened yarn in 100 degree water from the tap, shampooed it again to make sure the color had set, rinsed again and hung the skein in my shower to drip dry. The last time I checked, it had started drying to a pretty, rusty red. I can't wait to see it all the way dry. There will be before and after pictures very soon.
Meanwhile, I'm encouraged and think I'm going to do one more small skein with a LOT more KoolAid to attempt to get a nice even, dark red color. If that result can be had, I will be knitting the attrocious-no-more, formerly orange sweater into... a better sweater. My very first sweater. :D
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