Name: Anne


Message: I have heard of a method for knitting (pure wool) swatches (I got to your wonderful site via your mother), then somehow painting dye on them, unwinding the swatch and then reknitting so you can knit a 2 coloured fabric which has one or both colours a bit like multicoloured sock yarn. How would you do this? Many thanks for your marvellous information on your site.

Self-striping yarn is a really neat idea. In the original concept, you re-skein your yarn into very long loops for dyeing. To find out how long your loops should be, you knit a few rows similar to those you'll have in your finished garment, then unravel and measure how many inches of yard are required for each row. For example, if you want to dye yarn for striped socks, and if each row in the sock pattern requires 32 inches of yarn, you will need 32 inches of each row of each color. You could have an enormous skein that is 640 yards long (or 18 yards), dyeing 160 inches of yarn in each of four colors in order to get five-row-wide stripes.

Dyeing a 18 yard loop of yarn is obviously a cumbersome process for a beginner, though. How much easier it would be to work with machine-knitted rectangles of yarn, and then paint the dye onto the yarn! Again you must start by deciding how many inches of yarn will be required for each row, in your finished garment. In your knitted-to-dye swatches, make each row some even multiple of this length, either the same length, or exactly half of it or double it, if possible, to simplify matters.

I particularly like the effect when the final garment is knitted from two sets of yarn, either one solid color and one self-striping, or two different self-striping yarns, especially if, instead of striping, a continuous gradation is used.

Nancy Roberts has a site called "Machine Knitting to Dye For". Unfortunately, she does not have a book or video on how to do it, but she teaches classes and sells kits for you to learn her technique. You should certainly look at her site to get some ideas of interesting possibilities. Her gallery has some wonderful pieces.

To dye your wool yarn swatches, you have a wide choice of different kinds of acid dyes. Since you are in Australia, you will probably want to mail-order your dyes from either Batik Oetoro or KraftKolour, unless you have a particularly well-equipped local shop. Some Australians prefer to order from US companies such as Dharma Trading Company or PRO Chemical and Dye, because the prices are so much lower, for some dyes, that even after adding in the cost of shipping they find this more economical; however, this requires ordering by phone, not via web site, in order to request the slowest and cheapest form of shipping, as the fastest shipping is prohibitively expensive.

For dye-painting your knitted swatches, you want to get a dye for which you can find instructions for rainbow dyeing or dye painting, as opposed to immersion dyeing. Batik Oetoro has a recipe for "Cold Pad Batch Technique" for their acid dyes, though I think you'd get better colors with more heat. PRO Chemical & Dye (in the US) has instructions for rainbow dyeing with their acid dyes, very similar to their instructions for hand-painting wool with the same dyes, and rainbow dyeing with Lanaset dyes, which are the most wash-resistant of dyes for wool. You can buy Lanaset dyes in Austalia from KraftKolour.

Here is a link to a discussion on the Dye Forum about dyeing self-striping yarn. One of the posts I made there includes links to a number of online tutorials.

If you ever want to dye different fibers, you will need to use entirely different types of dyes. Cotton, linen, and rayon are best dyed with fiber reactive dyes, such as the Procion MX dyes popular for use in tie-dyeing, while acrylic must be dyed with either disperse dyes or basic dyes. As long as you are dyeing wool, you will want to use acid dyes of one sort or another. The Lanaset dyes are some of the best.

I would be happy to walk you through more details on how to dye-paint your wool for specific effects, if you like.

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