Part one of a series where Kelly makes fugly yarn bearable.

I had picked up a couple of skeins of yarn at Staci’s yarn swap, knowing that they Needed Work. First up was a skein of beautifully handpainted laceweight wool. However, the yarn was a light shade of bright-as-hell pink. Not good. The other stuff was some poo-brown marl. I did not choose the yarn, the yarn chose me. Unfortunately I forgot to snap any before photos of the yarns in question, but there’s a crappy shot here on flickr.

Evasive action needed to be taken, stat. I enlisted Amy for help in this mission, and a quick trip to Texas Art Supply armed us with all the Jaquard Acid Dyes that two girls could want. We also purchased a myriad of supplies, including $3-for-two pots (score!) to cook our yarn. Lastly, we armed ourselves with some natural-colored Cascade 220 to fuel our tests.

In case you’re not hip to the dying thing, you basically fill a pot with water, dump in some dye, throw in the yarn, simmer for awhile, add vinegar to set the dye, and voila! Beauty! At least that’s the plan. My main mission was to make the pink yarn not so pink, while hopefully preserving the variegation.

Step 1: Blue + pink makes purple, right?

Wrong. 2/3 Violet, 1/3 what-we-thought-was-Sky Blue. Eww. Amy: “That is straight up fucking cobolt. There’s nothing sky blue about that.” Always classy, that Amy.

The yarn is a bit darker than in this photo. The poor pink yarn looks as cobolt-ey as the Cascade 220. The poo-brown marl is tinted blue, but has stayed stubbornly poo-brown. Ugh, I think that it’s acrylic.

It seems that we accidentally mislabeled our blues, so we had in fact used Royal Blue, aka ugly blue.

Step 2: Let’s not make it so ugly this time.

100% really-Sky blue. Not bad, but eh. The pink looks a blah shade of blue. Poo-brown marl looks angry and still pretty poo-brown. Definitely acrylic.

Amy overdyed her straight-up-fucking-cobolt blue yarn with Emerald Green and got a beeeeautiful peacock color. We ooh and ahh over this.

Step 3: Make It Work.

We needed something to temper down all that blue. The colors we were getting are waaay too bright. Unfortunately, we had only mixed up the cool colors (my rationale: I don’t want 10937 jars of leftover dye rooting around in my fridge) and didn’t purchase any neutrals. 90% Sky Blue, 10% Emerald Green. Results: better, but not great.

Amy dyed some more peacock and was happy.

I really do have an understanding of color theory. Had I been thinking even a little bit about this beforehand, I would have concentrated on getting true, primary colors rather than Royal Blue and Sky Blue. Bleah. Also, we desperately needed some black dye.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we venture into the land of warm colors.