Drip Dyeing » Knitting-and.com

If you only have tiny amounts of different coloured dyes left over from previous projects, you can still dye sliver that spin up into softly heathered variegated yarns using the drip dye technique.

You will need:

Sliver
Premixed dyes (mix them according to the instructions that come with your brand of dye).
Plastic wrap
Syringes, small squirt bottles or old teaspoons
Dishwashing liquid

Rubber gloves, apron etc to keep yourself clean 🙂

Click on the image for a larger view	1: First, soak your sliver in water with a small amount of dishwashing detergent for at least half an hour. 2: Spin out the excess water and lay the sliver down onto some microwave proof sandwich wrap. 3: Squirt dye onto your damp sliver using a syringe or squirt bottle. The sample on the left is dyed with Ashford brown, teal, yellow, purple and scarlet. 4: Wrap in plastic and press the air out as much as possible. This will also encourage the dye to soak into your sliver and run together to create many subtle variations of colour
Click on the image for a larger view	5: Set the dye by microwaving your yarn or fibre for 2 minutes, then leave for 2 minutes and repeat two or three times more (leaving it to cool down completely after the final heating). Make sure that the plastic wrap you have used is microwave safe before heating. Check after each time you heat your yarn/fibre. If it has dried, don’t heat it again (and don’t microwave yarns with a metallic thread or core!) OR You can use a slit open oven bag instead of glad wrap and heat your painted yarn/fibre in your oven for 1/2 an hour at 100 degrees Celsius.
	I separated my sliver into strips and spun it quite finely,
Click on the image for a larger view	then plied it with white to make a softly coloured fingering weight yarn (approximately 3 ply).
Click the image for a larger view	This image shows the same dye technique used on a small skein of hand spun yarn…
	and the dyed skein knit into a swatch. As you can see, drip dyeing a spun skein of yarn makes a variegated yarn with very short lengths of colour. This is a great way to make sure that you’ll never have problems with colour-pooling.