Materials: 1 unloved and unworn handknit sweater. Jacquard Acid Dyes in Gun Metal and Purple from Knitpicks. One large 12-quart stainless steel stockpot from Canadian Tire. Scrappy wooden spoons, scrappy teaspoon and disposable face mask.

Time: Several weeks, mostly drying.

Cost: $33.

I cleaned out my sweater box a little while ago and purged a small number of sweaters that I’d knit but never got around to wearing.  The one that gave me the most conflict was a very warm, very hard-wearing cardigan made from some Peace Fleece, because — though its thickness and resilience made it perfect for wearing in winter around the house — I kind of hated it, for two reasons.  One is that it had been the survivor of a moth scare, and still smelled strongly of mothballs, and the other was the color. It looks all innocent and creamy in the photo below, but in real life possessed this slight yellowish-greenish tinge, like the color of a sweater that had been sitting in a closet since the 1970s or which had been exposed to years and years of secondhand cigarette smoke.  There are fewer colors more singularly unflattering on me, or guaranteed to make me look more jaundiced and ill.  To top it off, it had speckles of mint green and violet sprinkled through it, which just… no.

I really had issues with it.

A week or so passed, as I idly contemplated the Peace Fleece yarn itself — it’s scratchy as hell, and not something I can ever wear against the skin, but it’s very warm and wears like iron.  It’d be the perfect thing for a dedicated sweater to wear around the house, because I’d never be able to damage it.  And — lightbulb moment — I already had more than enough on hand; I just needed to reclaim it, and change the color.  What did I have to lose, really?

Using some of the sweater recycling tutorials available on the web, I spent a few mornings undoing seams and unravelling yarn in a mohair-infused cloud of mothball smell.  (I also brushed off the couch a few times in the process.)  The photo above is only half of the resulting yarn ramen, or yarn vomit…

… which was then treated to a long, relaxing soak in lukewarm water and a generous dose of Eucalan, then hung up to dry.  And the drying took a while.  The cheap tension rod holding up our bedroom curtains was suspended across our short bathroom hallway, and — thanks to its firmly resting on top of the door moldings — kept the yarn out of sight (and above our heads) as it aired out, post-soak.

After some research, I decided that acid dyes would be the surest bet for transforming the yellowish yarn into something more palatable.  There’s tons of information out there on dyes; I mostly stuck to the advice in this Knitty article.  While the safety cautions about acid dyes are scary, the conclusion I reached was that if I followed safety procedures, the biggest threat would be accidentally dyeing my kitchen purple.

I bought the dyes with some yarn from Knit Picks, but spent a couple of unfruitful afternoons raiding a number of Montreal-area thrift stores for a dyeing vessel.  Montreal goes against all conventional thrift-store wisdom — I was not able to find a single used crockpot, or cheap stainless dutch oven (no matter how beaten up) to use for my project.  I eventually ended up buying a big stainless stockpot from Canadian Tire, justifying the price by noting that I’ll probably be able to use it for some other future project.

I used my digital scale to divide the yarn into three equal pot-filling lots, and divided the dye out into equal portions (above).  The one place in this entire process where guesswork played a significant factor was estimating the amount of dye necessary to cover the white and candy-colored flecks in the yarn.  I knew I’d be fine with any shade of dark-ish purple or blue, so I erred on the side of using too much dye.  Despite my caution, you can see how dye gets everywhere when you look at the wet paper towels above.  (Happily, the floors and countertops of our rented apartment are really stunningly crappy, so I didn’t care about getting them stained.)

Simmering away on the stove, with a bit of vinegar for good measure.  I took all of the recommended cautions and avoided stirring it around more than necessary, but the color distribution on all of the batches ended up being very even — I didn’t end up with three different dye lots, which was my big fear.  However, because I was so dye-happy, the dye was never entirely exhausted; I had to drain each lot after about 35 minutes.

Pre-soaking, pre-dyed wool on the right, and post-dye, post-post-dye soak wool on the left.  Big difference, huh?  Despite the dye left in the pot at the end of the process, almost none rinsed out in the post-dye soak; it’s really colorfast.  Imagine all of the newly purple yarn spending another week or so hanging in the hallway, and…

The finished product.  I love how the re-dyed yarn turned out.  The color is a very dark purple or blackberry, with only a little bit of variation.  (The gauge swatch above was knit with the one tiny skein that I tied up too tightly, so it has a few white specks on it.)  It’s still the warm, virtually indestructible yarn I bought years ago, but now in a color that I adore.  And it no longer smells like mothballs at all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 8:57 am and is filed under diy, notes, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.