I haven’t posted a dye update in ages, because my last project was so huge it’s daunting to even describe! This was it: enough yarn for a smallish afghan, for my mother (she hasn’t crocheted in years, but needed something to do while she takes it a bit easier during recovery from heart surgery). I thought it’d be fun to give her a variety of colors to play with, since that’s how I remember afghans working. She wanted oranges and browns.
The one big mistake I made is in buying inexpensive yarn to start from – it was cheap, yes, but it needed a lot of extra work to be dyeable. First, it had to be wound into skeins. The first time I attempted to mordant a couple of skeins, it barely took, and I got really pale colors as a result. On my second try, I first soaked all the skeins in an alkaline (washing soda) solution, and that worked waaaaay better. Lesson: if you’re going to use yarn from a big box craft store, you have to work harder to remove sizing and/or other goop from it before it’s ready for mordanting & dyeing.
I didn’t take pictures of every single dye in its pot – there were just so many dyes in so many pots, and over a period of a couple of weeks.