Semi-solid attempt #1

The other day I dyed yarn in the oven for the first time, loosely following this tutorial. A lot of people set hand-painted yarn in the microwave, and I have tried this once in the past with not so brilliant results. Since I currently don't have a microwave, and the idea of cooking plastic wrap in any device sort of bothers me, I thought I'd try the oven.

Since I love semi-solid yarns, I attempted to produce some this time. I've done semi-solid tonal colours on the stove, just by virtue of uneven dye distribution - what I mean by tonal is different concentrations of the same colour dye. In this case I wanted to try semi-solid using different colours. The idea was to mix up a few colours of dye, paint them on the yarn, mush it around a bit, and then bake it. I tried to mix up dye solutions that were close variations - not too contrasting or clashing. Unfortunately, dye solutions that are various shades of greeny blue all kind of look black in the jar, and I was too lazy to try the paper towel or flour tests.*



The above photo (sorry about the flash) shows the pre-baked handpainted yarn. As you can see, the colours I made were quite contrast-y. Oops. I decided to bake it and see what happened, even though I didn't think it would turn out semi-solid. I didn't take a picture of the result, but it wasn't to my liking. There was more neon green than I'd hoped, and it looked weird with the blackish-blue. (Neon green is awesome, but I already have socks on the go in that shade, and was looking for something else!) I decided to dye it again, this time on the stove.

And tada!



I over-dyed it blue, and I quite like these results. The blue toned down the neon green and while it's still quite variegated, the colours are less contrasted now. I am curious to see how this knits up. Whether or not this is a semi-solid fail remains to be seen, but I really like it all the same!



This is 100g of 75% wool, 25% nylon sock yarn. Once again, my camera sucks at capturing green. Imagine there are streaks of slightly brighter yellow-green running through this, in addition to the blue-greens.

*Testing a few drops of dye solution on a paper towl or in a small amount of white flour is supposed to give you an idea of what colour the yarn will come out. I'm not sure if this works, since I never do it.