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.
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| 6 10gm skeins after being dyed midnight blue in 6 DOS |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| After the first color is applied, Carmine Red, before being wound back into a ball starting with the red |
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| After the second color, Golden Yellow, is applied and wound from a ball into a skein before rinsing and drying. |
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| 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?
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| Painted method using Turquoise and Lemon Yellow that mixed to make a nice bright jade |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
