Class on How to Dye Yarn - Part 1

A month ago I took a class at Sugarbee Studios on how to dye yarn. So far, I have no interest in spinning. But dying yarn for my own purposes absolutely fascinates me! Sugarbee is a local Fiber Artist who has recently received recognition on Lime & Violet. It is a true honor to be able to take this class from her. One thing I learned is that you can make dying yarn very scientific....or not. I have enough math in my life as it is; so we chose to go with the "or not" method. After all, my interest in the fiber arts has been sparked not because I need more analytic stuff in my life but that I needed to get in touch with the creativity that I wasn't sure that I had.

Here is Sugarbee herself with some of her dyes. When the class was over, she gave me generous samples of 8 dyes so I can play around at home. She gave me everything I needed to get started except the yarn blanks and the crockpot.
For the lesson, we dyed yarn using several methods of applying the dye. For one, we put the yarn in the crockpot and then poured on dye that we had premixed with water and placed in bottles. The yarn above reminds me of an Easter Egg!

Here's the bottles ready to go!

Another method is to put the yarn in the water and then put the powdered dye into the crockpot and distribute the color gently. I actually preferred this method. The yarn above was sticking out on purpose. Later we gently pushed the white part down into the dye as we were going for a tone on tone blue color.

To me, I'd thought that getting a deeply saturated black would be difficult. Not so! This came out very black. The grey was nice and grey and the Hot Fuschia (love that name!) was also very vibrant. Later I realized that I already had a Sugarbee yarn very close to these colors so Sugarbee showed me how you can overdye yarn.

All of my yarn came out beautiful! You're going to have to wait for a 2nd post though to see the results! If you ever get a chance to take a class I would highly suggest it. It really is very forgiving, very fun, and very satisfying.

Make sure you check out Sugarbee's blog which also has a link to her Etsy shop. If you're a spinner, she also sells the most amazing batts. Like nothing I've ever seen before!

Check back soon for part 2 where I'll show the results of my class to include the yarn that we overdyed!