Immersion Dyeing - Experimenting With 3 Colours

I had so much fun with the pink and grey yarn that I wanted to do another one today, and I even remembered to document the process!  I won't go through al the How To steps, since I did that in yesterday's post, but I will show you what I did.

I did a skein a while back I called Pink Lemonade (shown in the How To - Skillet Dyeing post) that was a combination of pink and yellow, and that I totally loved. It has since gone on to become one pair of Hermione's Everyday Socks and one pair of Mosaic Socks.

Pink Lemonade

I decided to play around with that idea with a twisted skein of yarn, and I had an idea of how I could add a little punch of colour to the whole thing.

So I dyed the yellow first:

6 drops Wilton Color Right in Yellow

Then I dyed the pink:

6 drops Wilton Color Right in Pink
Looks a bit orange because you can see so much of the yellow, but it was pink

When the pink was almost entirely exhausted, I decided to add some hints of a third colour.  I had pink and yellow, so I figured if I added blue, I would get some purples and greens mixed in.   So I mixed up a tiny bit of blue.

2 drop Wilton Color Right blue in one of my disposable shot glasses

Then I use the medicine syringe to inject small amounts of blue into the skein, putting some in the pink and some in the yellow.

Some pretty blue dots

What I hadn't really taken into account when I did this was that blue is the colour that takes longest to strike, which means it has more time to travel.  And it did travel down into the yarn.  When I saw the slightly pink dye bath start to turn green, I decided it was probably time to take it out. I put it on a plate and zapped it in the microwave for 2 minutes - the blue had not been in there for the standard 20 mins, so I wanted to make sure to give it that extra shot of heat.

On the plate, cooling after being zapped

As with the other skein I dyed, I had no idea what the bottom was going to look like, and was pretty happy to see the colours when I flipped it over.

The hidden colour treasure!

I untwisted the skein a bit to let it cool faster, and was very pleased with the mixture of colour I was seeing

Slightly untwisted, still wet (and hot..there was a lot of steam)

I washed, rinsed and dried the yarn, then reskeined it. I used to hate reskeining, but am starting to like it more and more...it gives a new perspective that you don't quite get when you wind it directly into a cake.

Lite Brite Colour Way

My friend Natalie named it Lite Brite, after the fun toy we used to play with as kids (and of course, now I want one again...)

A close-up of the end of the skein. So many pretty colours!

I will definitely be playing with this method more often... For the next one, I might try a complete submersion of the first colour, then re-twisting the skein and doing a full submersion of the second colour. If I do that, I might even do something radical like not aim for a super saturate colourway.... Can you imagine? I might use less than 6 drops of colour per shade!!! I don't normally purposely dye anything pastel, as much as I love pastels, but I might try to go for even just 2 drops of each colour and see what I can build up :)