An Experiment With Yarn and Daylilies

Karen L. brought this article to my attention. It should be of interest to anyone interested in natural dyeing as it uses alcohol to extract the dye. I will paste the entire article here, as these things are sometimes taken down and/or impossible to find later.

From https://www.knittingparadise.com/t-609083-1.html:

May 31, 2019 23:07:09   #

DaylilyDawn

Recently I did an experiment with yarn and my daylilies by taking alcohol and placing some of it in a jar with a lid. Then I took the flower petals off one of my daylilies, Buddy's Black Jack a red flower with a big black eye zone. I place the petals in the jar of alcohol and let it sit overnight. The next morning all of the color in the petals had been extracted by the alcohol and only white plant tissue was left and removed. I repeat that with several flowers over a period of days. The alcohol is going to be used as a dye. The experiment was to take a quarter of a cup of water and put in a small pot.Then I added 2 teaspoons of the alcohol. I soak a few inches of Knit Picks Swish DK weigh yarn in warm water and a splash of vinegar. Once the yarn was saturated, I placed it into the pot with the colored alcohol. I raised the water temperature to boiling and then turned it down to simmer for 10 minutes. Then Turned the heat off. The yarn was left to cool in the water. When the yarn was cooled I removed the yarn and washed it with a drop of dish soap. Then rinsed it very well and let it dry.It had been a rosy lavender. I repeated the dye process and got a deeper color. I also tested some Knit Picks Gloss lace weight in the color Sterling Gray. It turned the gray yarn a very pretty lavender color

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Although the color looks different in the photo, this is a detail of the sweater just above

Hand-dyed and commercial yarns

Clair Tries Overdyeing Wool Yarn With Food Coloring

There is a wonderful article called Turquoise Dreams about this dye technique. It can be found on the blog called Maiya Knits, Mayhem Ensues. Please read it for complete instructions, measurements, and timing. I'll just give you the highlights of my own experience here. 

Even though it was a pretty hot August day in my kitchen, I enjoyed this first experience of dyeing with food coloring. One advantage of using food grade coloring instead of acid dyes, or even natural dyes requiring chemical mordants, is that regular kitchen tools can be used. When I used acid dyes long ago they had to be used with bowls, pots, and utensils kept separate from our regular cooking utensils. 

After reading Maiya's blog, I couldn't wait for my order of white yarn to arrive, so I used a skein of light yellow fingering weight yarn from my stash. The color was Semolina.

Note: Food coloring will dye only natural fibers.

 Following Maiya's directions, I wound the yarn into 5 interconnected smaller skeins.

The skeins were first soaked in plain warm water to relax the fibers. This photo makes the yellow color look funny, but it's still the same as in the first photos above.

The dyeing process involves a crock pot and a dye solution made from McCormick's Food Coloring in blue and green, with some white vinegar added. 

Four of the skeins go into the pot, and the fifth skein is quickly dipped in and immediately removed. After 10 minutes the second skein is removed, the dye is replenished; and this continues with different timings until the last skein is finally removed. 

The drained and cooled skeins are gently washed, rinsed, and hung to dry. You can see from the photo below that I tied the skeins too tightly in several places, which gave an unintentional tie-dye effect. Lesson learned!

I wish that I had managed to get a greater color difference in the top three skeins, but I had used up all of my tiny bottle of blue food coloring. I hope the color change shows better when the yarn is knitted up.

When I wound the skeins into cakes, I started with a bit of the original Semolina color. I would have liked all the yarn in one cake but it got too big for the ball winder. You might be able to tell from the photo that the outside of the right cake is just a little lighter than the inside of the left cake, so the yarn would be used from the middle of each cake, starting with the lighter one, to make the color gradation go from light to dark.

Next time, I'm going to try some more overdyeing, only this time with Kool-Aid! I'll report back.