Gradient Cotton Yarn/Thread Dyeing Tutorial – Painted Ball Method

Gradient Cotton Yarn/Thread Dyeing Tutorial – Painted Ball Method

Hi Everyone!

Now that I have given a basic breakdown of my past experiments with dyeing cotton yarn/thread into gradient colorways let’s move onto what everyone wants to see a full tutorial!

Today I am going to breakdown my most recent and favorite method of dyeing cotton yarn via the Painted Ball Method, wish I had a better name for it lol!

As noted in my previous post here this is a very time, space and water saving method – well in my eyes at least – and creates some lovely results!

 

Supplies

1.       ProcionMx Fiber reactive dye – see my previous posts about which dyes to buy or not. You can do this with just one color to create a single color Ombre effect or use multiple colors for a gradient effect.

 

2.       100% Cotton yarn or thread, you can also use any other cellulose fiber or mix of cellulose fibers such as a cotton linen mix, but anything acrylic or wool will not work.

 

3.       Soda Ash or Washing Soda or Sodium Carbonate this is the setting agent for the dye

 

4.       Synthrapol soap or dawn dish soap

 

5.       Urea – Optional, this is an agent that helps dissolve dyes when mixing and keeps moisture present in the batching process

 

6.       Rubber gloves, face mask & art smock or coveralls

 

7.       Measuring cups & spoons

 

8.       Mixing containers, can be plastic cups, containers or squeeze bottles whichever you have

 

9.       1 liter plastic bucket or container for pre-washing, soda ash soak and rinsing if you don’t want to use your sink

 

10.   Plastic drop cloth or newspapers for workspace covering

 

11.   Digital kitchen scale – this is optional but I use it to weigh my yarn to make the ingredient calculations, but if you know the weight of you yarn based on the label that can be used instead. I don’t use a scale to measure my dye and ingredients, just measuring cups and spoons, this is less accurate but I’m not a professional.

12.   Ziploc or seal able bag & saran wrap – saran wrap is optional but I find it keeps the dye run off tidy in the bag.

 

13.   Paper towels and cloth rags

 

14.   Tin roasting pan to work in

 

15.   Yarn swift and niddy noddy – these are optional but a big time saver see my supplies post

 

 

Step 1.

Calculations

First I need to do some simple calculations to ensure that I get the colors I want based mostly on the weight of my yarn.

Depth of Shade/DOS

Depth of Shade or DOS refers to how dark/saturated a color you wish to produce, for example a 5% DOS will produce a fairly dark/saturated version of the color, whereas a 1% DOS would be more pastel looking and a 3% DOS would be somewhere in the middle. Calculating DOS will then determine how much dye powder you will need to measure out. I usually work with 5% DOS to get a very saturated color that can then lighten as it penetrates the ball, but this up to taste.

Calculation;

Weight of Fiber/WOF x DOS = how many grams of dye powder to use

Ex. WOF = 100gms x DOS= 5% = 5gms dye powder or 100gms x .05 = 5gms dye powder

 

Dyestock Strength

Now that I have determined the DOS I want to use I will calculate my dyestock strength, this means figuring out how much mixing water to add to the dye powder to get the DOS I desire.

Calculation;

Gms of dye x ml of mixing water

Ex. Gms of dye = 5gms x mixing water = 100ml = 5% DOS dyestock

Ex 2. Gms of dye = 5gms x mixing water = 150ml = 3% DOS dyestock

 

Optional Dyestock Use Estimation

Next up in my calculations I will estimate how much yarn I want to be dyed with each color, so for example if I was doing 4 colors on a 100gm ball I will estimate that I want to dye about 10gms of the ball the first color, 20gms of the ball in 2^nd color, 25gms of the ball in 3^rd color and 45gms in the 4^th color. I do this because the designs I work with are circular doilies that work out from the center and I want to create a full color change across the design. If I dyed each color the same amounts it would end up leaving not much color progression see below.

 

After I figure out these estimates it’s just a matter of converting gms to ml to determine how many ml of dyestock in that color that I will measure out to use. I try to mix up as small amount of dyestock as I can to cut down on waste, and often do more than one ball at a time so I can use up as much dye as possible.

So for the above project I would need color 1 = 10ml, 2 = 20ml, 3 = 25ml, 4 = 45ml. This is a very small amount of dyestock to mix up and would require a precise scale to measure out such a small amount of dye powder, which is why I recommend mixing up a solution in at least 100mls of water and subtracting the exact amount you need instead. Or you can just mix up 100mls of your dyestock solution and estimate how much you are going to use as you paint it on the ball.

Soda Ash Solution

Typically I will mix up a soda ash solution in a big 1 litre empty iced tea jug and keep it set aside for future projects, once mixed soda ash solution does not go bad. For soda ash I follow the dye manufactures recommendation of 100gms soda ash mixed with 1 litre/1000ml/4cups of warm water between 95-110F or 35-45C, this makes a soda ash solution at 10% strength. Give the bottle a good shake until powder is dissolved and set aside after labeling to cool to room temperature.

Urea water

Using urea in your dye mixing water is optional, it can make some dyes like fuchsia and other reds easier to dissolve and will keep your yarn wet during the batching/setting time resulting in more vibrant colors. Otherwise using plain old tap water to mix your dyes will suffice.

As per dye manufactures recommendation add 1 tablespoon of urea to 100ml warm water, or mix up 10 tablespoons in a 1 litre bottle if you are doing a big project. Since urea has to dissolve in warm water between 95-110F or 35-45C its best to mix the urea water separately like the soda ash and set it aside to cool down to room temperature so that it doesn’t affect the dyes when mixing.

Dyes should be mixed with water in temperatures between 75-95F or 25-35C to ensure that the heat does not cause the dye to react with the mixing water rather than the fiber, this can result in paler colors. The exception is turquoise which reacts slower and at temps around 110F or 45C, but will do fine with lower temperatures above.

 

Step 2. 

Prep and setup

Setup your workspace

First prepare and setup your workspace, I work in my kitchen so I make sure to clear off the counters and wash up all my regular dishes so that there’s nothing on the counters or in the sink when working with dyes and chemicals. Cover your surfaces with your plastic drop cloth or newspapers, I cover up my kitchen island counter where I do the majority of my work but not the floors, I have laminate floors and will just do a quick Swiffer mop after I’m done to clear up any drips or spills, to each their own.

Wash and soak yarn

To prep your yarn/thread will be dependent on if you want to wind your yarn into a ball off a skein or not, having a yarn swift to make a skein and wind off into a ball as you dye is really helpful but you could also make your skein by wrapping your yarn around the legs of two chairs. If that’s too labor intensive or you don’t want soda ash or dye possibly staining your furniture you can skip making a skein and proceed to scour and soak your yarn either in the ball it came in or wrap into a ball.

Once you have made your skein or ball of yarn soak and scour it in hot water and soap for about 20 minutes, wring out and move into the 1 liter plastic bucket. Fill the bucket up with pre-made soda ash solution until it covers your yarn. If your yarn is in a ball be sure to give the ball a good squeeze to get as much soda ash solution into the ball as possible. Let this soak for 20mins to an hour, during which time you can mix up your dyes. 

Mix dyestocks

Dyestock mixtures, while wearing gloves, face mask and some sort of covering on your clothes, set aside your measuring cups, urea water or mixing water, mixing cups, measuring spoons and mixing utensils into your tin roasting pan to catch your spills leaving less to clean up on your drop cloth. 

Here's my kitchen island all covered and set up to mix up my dyestocks, I kept them in the mason jars until I measure out the amount I want to use for each ball into a squeeze bottle.

 

When measuring out dye powder with your measuring spoons be sure that the spoons are clean of any other dye but also that they are completely dry to keep moisture out of your dye powder jars. Once in your mixing container, add a small amount of urea water at first and mix the dye into a paste before adding the rest of your water and mixing until all powder is dissolved. Set aside your mixed dyestocks in the containers you will be using, for me squeeze bottles.

In this example I am doing a 70gm ball of white thread with 3 colors as per my calculations above, I have mixed my 5gms of dye powder with 100mls of urea water in the following colors, Fuchsia, Peach and Emerald. I will use 10 ml of fuchsia, 25mls of peach and 35ml of emerald.

 

 

Step 3. 

Dyeing/Pouring/Painting

Now that all the dye is mixed up I will remove my mask and change my gloves or wash and dry them to ensure no stray dye is on them for when I handle the yarn.

Remove your yarn from the soda ash water and wring out until slightly damp, remember to wear gloves doing this because the soda ash can act as an irritant on your skin. You can pour left over soda ash solution back into your bottle, it may lose some of its strength but no use in wasting it. 

 

Place your skein onto your yarn swift or over 2 chair legs, or if using straight from the ball place in the now empty bucket to keep the ball in a clean place as you wind it in another ball while dying. Set out your dyestock colors and your clean tin roasting pan and a plastic bowl or container in the tin pan to catch run off dye.

 

3 colors used for this ball, fuchsia, peach and emerald

Begin winding your yarn into a tight ball for a bit, then begin to wind the ball more loosely say around 2-3 fingers for a while based on your estimates of how much you want to dye in color 1.

Wrapping the ball tight at the beginning will give a very pale penetration of the color 1 with a bit of white at the beginning.

Wrap the ball loose around a few fingers, this may result in a bit of tangling at then end but nothing too dramatic.

 

Over the plastic container or bowl in your tin roasting pan, start pouring your dye for color 1 over the ball until it is covered. Squeeze the ball and wring out this dye into the bowl, then roll the ball around in it and soak it back up. Do this a few times but be sure to soak up the remaining dyestock in the bowl or pour down the sink once you are done, it should not go back into the bottle with your left over dyestock as it has now come into contact with soda ash and it will spoil the remaining dyestock you have left over in the bottle.

Soaking up left over color in the bowl

Begin wrapping the yarn tightly around your dyed color 1 ball, until the color is no longer seeping through as much. Then start wrapping the ball more loosely around your fingers and repeat for each color.

 

Wrap tightly until you are seeing more white than color before wrapping loosely again

 

Ready for color 2 peach

At this point I will wash and dry my gloves to get as much of color 1 off my gloves before moving onto color 2, this should be done between each color.

Tight wrapping again

Your next emerald

And the final color Emerald

Once all dye colors have been applied wrap the ball up in a piece of saran wrap and place in to a ziplock or sealable plastic bag. Place this bag somewhere relatively warm to batch/set for the next 12-24 hours.

Saran wrap keeps excess dye from running out into the bag

All bagged up and ready for batching

 

Now all that’s left for the day is to clean up your workspace, so easy!

 

Step 4. 

Rinsing & Drying

After batching/setting overnight take the ball out of the bag, I usually rinse and dry these bags to reuse to cut down on waste but throw away the saran wrap.

 

Give the ball a quick rinse in cool water in the sink, squeeze out and put in plastic bucket to contain the ball as you unwind it into a skein.

Quick Rinse in cool water before winding into a skein

 At this point unwinding the ball into a skein is essential to be able to properly rinse out the soda ash, excess dye and dry out, you will not be able to allow the ball to dry in ball form and then use, never done it but I can’t imagine that working out well.

However you need to do it, either with a yarn swift or niddy noddy or around some chair legs, be sure to wear a long sleeved shirt and rubber gloves to catch any soda ash or water that come off as you unwind the ball so it doesn’t get on your skin and cause irritation or staining. Tie up your skein to keep from tangling and take back to the sink for rinsing.

Ball in bucket to keep it clean while winding into a skein, I like putting paper towels in there to soak up extra water

Tie onto the niddy noddy, bad me not taking my own advice on gloves and long sleeve shirts, I did put them on eventually I swear!

A little tangle that I will fix up during this time, excuse my toe lol!

But it is just so fun to see the color transitions work out as I wind them onto the niddy noddy

 

Ain't she a beauty? Future Indunn doily

All tied up and ready for rinsing, note colors will be darker before the rinse out and dry

Run the skein under cool/cold water to wash out the remaining soda ash, rinsing this out ensures that any unfixed dye left in the skein will not set where it spreads when you soak it in hot water causing color bleeding. 

 

Initial cold rinse under the tap to get soda ash out.

Fill up your sink, wash basin or bucket with the hottest water your tap will provide, add a small drop or two of synthrapol soap or regular dish soap, then put the skein in to soak for an hour or until the water cools. If after the hot soap soak you still find color running out of your skein do another hot soap soak until it runs clear or clearer.

Only need a small amount of soap in hot soak.

Splish Splash I'm having a bath!

 

Wring the skein out and hang up or lay out somewhere to dry, usually takes 24-48 hours to be dry before you can wind back into a ball for use.

And there they all are hanging up to dry over the bathtub on coat hangers, will be 24 hours min to dry

 

Below are the pre-dry results of my biggest dye day yet, I dyed 8 balls of thread in about 8 hours, if I had mixed up my dyestock the night before it might have taken less time. Or better yet if I had more measuring spoons and squeeze bottles there would have been less washing between colors. 

Winding and pouring on dye for each ball really only takes about 20-30 minutes depending on how big the ball and how many colors used. Then I just left them all to sleep in their little ziplock cocoons before they emerged the next day on my niddy noddy for winding & rinsing day.

Future Teagan doily, in aquamarine, turquoise, fuchsia and lilac

Future Camilla doily in peach, lilac and turquoise

Future Fairie doily in golden yellow, lilac and warm black

Future Amal doily in bright green, emerald and teal

Future Irida doily in lilac and teal

Future Birgitta doily in peach, golden yellow, aquamarine and teal

Future Emma doily in golden yellow, fuchsia, aquamarine and teal

 

And that’s it! That is my newest and favorite method of dyeing gradients for cotton thread, thanks for reading, I hope you find it useful in your dye adventure!

 

Dyeing Gradients - Methods

Dyeing Gradients - Methods

 

Oh boy are you in for a long treat lol! I have spent the better part of a year doing ball dyed gradient experiments on cotton crochet thread. You see I like to make doilies that take up quite a lot of thread, the patterns people put out these days are really gorgeous. I don't want to be all “these aren't your grandmothers doilies” but they really aren’t lol!

Pattern: Linda by Zoya Matyushenko

In any case I decided to investigate how to dye up a quick and easy gradient, the doilies are typically worked in the round and so the color can really make the design shine from the center out. 

In this post I will give a brief run down of the methods I have worked with over the past year with some pictures for examples, I will break detail each of these in separate dedicated posts another time.

Method 1. Small Skeins 

Most instructions for creating a gradient or Ombre colored skein of yarn are done by making small skeins either interconnected or cut from the main skein, each small skein will then be either painted or immersed in a different dye color or shade before being wound back into a single skein.. 

I find this to be annoying since you can't use a yarn swift to make the mini hanks all interconnected, not easily anyway, and then getting them back into a ball after dyeing basically means you are winding the mini hanks by hand not off the swift to keep them from tangling.

 Pattern: Ruth by Grace Fearon

6 10gm skeins after being dyed midnight blue in 6 DOS

6 dyebaths of various DOS in Midnight Blue

I've been trying to avoid this method forever, as I think it’s too time consuming to be worth it. But I have done up single color gradients in different DOS in small 10gm hanks that weren't connected. It comes out well enough, still a little time consuming what with the skein weighing and dyeing etc. and then having to sew in ends when using them in a pattern.  

Plus, with the way that doily designs work, the center to the first 10 rows or so will not use that much thread and therefore found that what I ended up with was the lighter shades taking up lots of the pattern and the rest of the shades not being fully used until the end, which is sort of a bummer.

Pattern Alura Oval by Irina Maleeva

I did once dye up a staggered gradient skein with 5gms x2, 10gms x2, 15gms and 25gms length skeins in shades from lightest to darkest. This worked out nicely on the pattern actually, but still rather time intensive. 

Some patterns do tend to use more thread only at the end and those sorts of patterns are the ones I might consider doing the above for to get a nice distribution of colors. 

Pattern Camilla by Galyna Borysova

But more often than not I have better success with dyeing a 2 color or single color gradient in a ball, which is my favorite method of creating a gradient color.

Pattern Ida by Zoya Matyushenko

Why? Its space conscious you don't need a big studio to pull it off, its time efficient in that you don't need to make a bunch of small skeins and then deal with untangling and re-winding them into a skein and the clean up is fairly easy.  I think that over the year I may have actually perfected it, but I’m holding off judgement on my latest experiment until I have a few more successes. 

Method 2. Ball dyeing

So what is ball dyeing? This involves winding the thread into a traditional round ball, not a center pull ball this is important, and then using the ball as a built in resist against the dye so that it only penetrates about half way and will give some lighter to darker results. Then of course you need to wind the ball the other way and dye it a second color before making a skein, rinsing out and hanging up to dry.

This method, as with all others, seems a bit easier to me in wool/acid wash dyeing because the dye gets soaked up into the ball in the dye bath so you can tell how much dye has been used.

For fiber reactive dye on cotton the dye bath will never 'exhaust' or run clear with all the dye getting sucked into the fiber, the dye bath will stay colored and you will have to wait until your rinse out to find out how much of the dye reacted with your fiber.

 Anyway, I have done 3 different ways of ball dyeing

1. Immersion dyeing - where dye stock is mixed up and then added to a large amount of water, the ball is submerged in this dye bath, stirred around, add soda ash, pull out rinse repeat lather and dry. This can take as long as 4-5 hours total before rinsing and drying, due the fact that each color dyebath takes at least an hour and then the time spent unwinding and rewinding the wet ball for the next color.

After the first color is applied, Carmine Red, before being wound back into a ball starting with the red

After the second color, Golden Yellow, is applied and wound from a ball into a skein before rinsing and drying.

And the final result, the yellow center and its red gradient matched up perfectly with another gradient in Carmine red and Navy.
Pattern Hera by Grace Fearon

2. Ice dyeing - crazy idea I had after reading up on tie dye more, traditionally done by laying out a skein of yarn on a rack, putting heaps of ice on it sprinkled with dye powder and waiting for it to melt, this results in a marbled look. But what if instead I sprinkled an ice cube with dye or froze dye stock and then wrapped a ball of thread around the ice cube and let the melting and resistance do my work for me? 

The result of an ice dye job using 4 cubes of frozen dye in Warm Black, then 3 cubes of frozen dye in Bright Green and 1 cube of frozen dye in Lemon Yellow.

Pattern Foliage by Alla Chikalova

3. Painting/batching method - this came about during my ice dyeing experiments where I impatiently wondered what if I just wrapped the ice cube up, then poured dye stock of the second color over it and do both colors at the same time? This eventually evolved into painting/pouring both colors on at the same time and abandoning the ice cube method altogether. Pouring dye color 1 on, wrap the ball up with more thread until the first color stops showing and then pouring on the second color and batching for 24 hours.

To my surprise and satisfaction this method actually works out really nicely, it leaves little to no white streaking [sometimes I may not use enough dye for a color I think], and even some nice color blending or breaking during the batching process. I also like how the color transition is not so stark, the colors will blend to make another color but the colors will also become progressively less present while the other takes over giving it an almost plied look. 

Painted method using Turquoise and Lemon Yellow that mixed to make a nice bright jade

Pattern Charleen by Olga Shalaeva

By doing both or all the colors at once I can dye a ball with 2 or more colors in about 20 minutes before leaving it overnight to batch/set. That's minus the time to make a skein, soak it in soda ash and mix up dye colors, so total I would say is about 1 hour for a single ball with all the prep involved, what a time bargain!

 Method 3. Blank Dyeing

This method involves making a blank or sock blank as it often referred to, it involves knitting or crocheting up either a tube or a flat rectangle piece and then painting the dye colors on in stripes across the piece, letting it batch, rinsing, drying, unraveling and winding into a skein for future use. Or it can be done through the immersion method by submerging the blank briefly into the dye bath and then over a period of an hour or so slowly removing the piece a little bit more resulting in a smooth Ombre effect.

See this tutorial by Michelle over at SweetLeafNotebook

This method to me is simply too time consuming to make a sock blank and then dye, wash, dry and then unravel it for use.  A knitting machine either hand operated or electric is pretty essential to dyeing yarn in this way and they are quite costly, otherwise you would spend so much of your time knitting or crocheting blanks. Besides knitting machines are not very suitable for use with thin cotton thread, they work best with sport weight yarns and up.

This method is definitely favored by those in the sock knitting community and in the wool dyeing community, which I am unfortunately not a part of so it doesn't appeal to me and I have not done much experimentation with it. However those who do use it swear by it as an effective and, to them, an easy way of making gradient or color changing yarn. I might be missing something since I don't work with wool and acid dyes and it may very well be much easier this way for acid dyes, to each their own of course.

Method 4. Large skein dyeing

I have seen some examples of people making a laaaarrrggge skein to be able to appropriately paint a gradient on the skein. Normally making your average sized skein, say about one yard length, and then trying to paint it a gradient usually results in making a variegated or striped colorway because the skein is too small to spread out the color. So making a big skein either a very long one or a regular sized skein that is spread out horizontally would make it possible to paint the gradient color scheme. 

See this tutorial  for dyeing a gradient yarn by Kris on howdidyoumakethis

This would obviously take up quite a lot of space which I don't have, oh to have a backyard or basement, and would need to be hand wound into a ball aka not off the swift, pretty time and space consuming for me.

I would also put warp painting under this method, a warp is a weaving term and refers to the threads that are lengthwise on the loom. Some weaving artists will lay out their warp thread, which is quite long and not looped together like a skein, on plastic wrap and paint/dye it the colors they want in a very similar fashion as yarn dyers do above.

See this tutorial for warp painting by Susan at tangibledaydreams

At the moment I'm sticking with Ball dyeing via a pouring/painting method for now as it seems to be working really well for me. That's it for the run down on the methods I have used or researched for dyeing gradients in yarn, I'm sure there is more out there but this is what I have come up with in the last year. 

Thanks for reading, see you soon for more!