Rainbow Yarn - an Adventure in dyeing with Food Colouring

Have you seen the yarn from YarnInk.  She's a Canadian hand dyer.  I follow her on Instagram and everyday she puts up yarn that I have to resist buying.  I really hope that I'm getting some sock and shawl yarn from her this Christmas.  I gave my husband my list  . . . and he's pretty good at getting me stuff I like!

I keep looking at the Rainbow yarns she does.  My daughter would love a rainbow sweater, but at $27 a skein for DK weight yarn . . . .that's not happening.  So I decided to dye some myself.

I have 7 balls of Knit Picks Wool of the Andes that I had bought to make myself a white sweater.  After making another sweater for myself in Knit Picks Swish Worsted I decided I wanted to save up for a better quality yarn for something for myself.  For kids knits Knit Picks is great.

I wound 5 of the balls into skeins and followed the directions in this Knitty tutorial for how to dye using food colouring.

I got all my supplies organized before my son's nap and I had it ready to go in the oven just as he woke up.

 I left it in the oven until it reached 82 degrees Celsius.  The water looked all clear. 

I let it cool and rinsed it.  Hardly any colour came out.

Rainbow yarn skein yumminess!!  I'm so thrilled with how they turned out.  If I was to do this again I would use a bit less yellow dye . .  . to make it a bit mellower.  For the purple I used Kool aid, which I've done before but I would like to try purple food colouring and see if I get get a bit more variation in the purple.

For a sweater for a 3 1/2 year old girl!!  Perfect.

And I've already cast on  for her.  A pre-school size Baby Sunnyside Sweater. (It's the same pattern as I knit my last sweater, the Lady Sunnyside)  .  I'll have to call them Thunder and Rainbow sweaters since mine is grey.

The pattern calls for fingering weight yarn so I'm knitting the 3-6 month size using worsted weight yarn and 4.5 mm needles.  So far it looks to be the perfect size.  Happy Knitting.