My Awesome Dyeing Day

I spend another day dyeing yarn as I scored some really cheap white sock yarn at a local yarn store. This time, I wanted to try my hand at natural colors, namely onion skins! I got them for free from my grocery store (score!) so this is the cheapest dye I've ever done. I had about 85 g of onion skins and I dyed 300 g of yarn. (But they are not all the same color!) Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here is what it looked like in the beginning. Below is my 6 liter kettle with all the onion skins in.

I poured four and half liters water on top:

And then boiled for 45 minutes. Looks pretty different!

After taking out all the onion skins, this is what I was left with. Notice how you cannot see the white ladle at all, it fully disappears in the dye. And that's not just the picture, it really was like that!

Ok, now while I left the dye cool down a bit (my yarn was superwash but still, I didn't want to take any chances) I had soaked my yarn in vinegar water. I also added vinegar and salt to the dye, to get a nice even color and to make the dye sink in better. Then I put my 100 g of yarn in, heated and let it simmer for about an hour.

At the half hour mark I actually put another 100 g of yarn in. When I took the first patch in, I let the other one stay and after half an hour, put yet another 100 g in. But this last patch was not white, it was yellow from my previous dye with yellow food coloring (it's in this post). In the long run the light yellow just wasn't to my liking so I decided to try to dye it again.

Well, after that I hung the yarn to dry (yes, I'm keeping you in suspense little longer). The already yellow yarn became actually the exact color of the second white patch. I liked that color very much, but I didn't want to have 200 g of the same color, as I don't want to knit more than one pair of socks from the same color. So, it had to go back in the dye pot and this time I used blue food coloring. But alas, of course I put in two much and the yarn had a very artificial, yucky look to it. I didn't have any other color laying around anymore so I turned to my spice cabinet and put in turmeric! And the result, well, it's just beautiful! Below you can see all the lovely yarn that I am so happy with.

First patch onion skin dying - Spiced Pumpkin Pie

Second patch onion skin dyeing - Sunflowers

Yellow food coloring, onion skins, blue food coloring, turmeric dyeing - Green! Green!

The first patch, that lovely orange-brown really was a bitch bleeding but after letting it soak in vinegar for a whole night and then bringing it to simmer and letting cool I was finally able to get it dry. But I was going crazy with it, that's the truth. Luckily, the color is definitely worth it, at least now that all that pain is behind. The others weren't bad bleeders at all. Onion skin dyeing was fun and cheap, although I did use quite a bit of vinegar! Try it! Here is finally a group photo: