Natural Dyeing: Dye Multicolored Yarn With Natural Colors

1. 1: If you've ever wondered how to use plants to make beautiful multiclored yarn to knit or crochet with, then look no further. I'm a lifelong knitter, and I love using multicolored yarn. I find it so fun to see what color comes next and how speckled yarn looks as it turns into fabric. It's not hard to find commercially dyed yarn that's speckled or multi colored. But as a natural dyer and nature lover, creating these colors completely naturally is a deeply rewarding way to connect creative work with the beautiful world that we live in. Hi there. My name is Casey, and I'm a textile artist, and I specialize in using natural dyes in all of my work. My studio is on our farm here in the forest just outside of Portland, Oregon, and I'm excited to share this technique of dying yarn with you today. I specialize in botanical printing and using natural dyes to create beautiful wearables, home goods, and accessories. I've always loved making things with my own two hands, and I especially love knitting. In fact, some of my first dye experiments of any kind nearly 15 years ago now was dying yarn that I used to knit with. I've been using natural dyes exclusively in my work for over ten years now. And while dyeing solid colors is fairly straightforward, finding a way to easily create multicolored yarn took a bit of trial and error, and I'm excited to share all my tips and tricks with you today. In this class, I will share numerous dye sources from things you probably have in your kitchen to plants that are common in backyards, as well as some that are available to purchase online. I will teach you to prepare your fabric so that the colors will last through wearing and washing. And I'll walk you through several simple but effective ways to create complex color and pattern. If you're new to natural dyes, this is a great place to start, and you're practically guaranteed to come out with some beautiful yarn. If you have some experience already with natural dyes or dying yarn in general, then I'm sure you'll find some new tip and trick in here, a new technique, maybe a new way of looking at a natural dye plant. I look forward to having you in class and creating some beautiful all natural color together. 2. Class Project: The project for this class is to transform a bare skin of undyed yarn into some beautiful multiclored yarn to knit or crochet with or weave or macrom or anything that you like to do with yarn. This dye method I'm teaching allows some of the natural wool colour to remain, resulting in a beautiful speckled yarn. This is a really fun and creative method because you can also control how saturated the color is, adding more dyes to create more color and have less natural wool show through, if that's your preference. The colors you create on your yarn will vary according to which dye plants you have available to you or choose to purchase. But I've intentionally included some that you may already have in your home or garden or can easily find in any area. If you're a beginner, this is a great way to get started with bundle dyeing because I will walk you through all the steps. This course covers everything from preparing the fiber before you diet to washing and caring for it afterwards. All the natural dyes I share in this class are very colorfast, so your yarn will stay vibrant and gorgeous through its entire life. This dye project uses simple tools and equipment, and once you have your fiber prepared, you can complete the dye work in just an afternoon. I can't wait to share this natural process with you, so let's get started. 3. Supplies: Since this is a yarn dying workshop, let's start with the yarn. You're going to want some plain undyed wool yarn. It doesn't matter what weight it is. It can be worsted weight like this one or a finer weight like fingering, if you like to make socks. Even lace weight if you don't mind dealing with teeny, tiny little strands of fiber. Especially if this is your first time dying yarn, I really recommend that you use super wash wool yarn. Super wash yarn has been treated in a way that makes it so that those fibers will not accidentally felt. Regular wool yarn, if it's heated and cooled too quickly or agitated too much by stirring, those fibers can stick together permanently and cause a big tangled mess in your yarn. You can use plain non super wash yarn, but using super wash just means there's one less thing to worry about during this process. You will need your yarn to be in a skin. It might look like a twist like this when you purchase it. If you untwist this, you will find that the yarn is in a big loop and it usually is tied in a few places to keep it together, prevent it from becoming really tangled. You want your yarn in a shape like this so that all of the strands are exposed and that the dye can get to all of it. This is dyed, obviously, but imagine if your yarn were in a ball like this. The dyes can't get to the center here, and you would have a lot of fiber left plain white, not dyed. If your yarn does come like this, you have a ball of yarn or a cone of yarn, perhaps, then you will just want to unwind it. You might loop it around the backs of two chairs, end up making a big circle so that it looks like this. Your yarn will need to be mordinted. That means treated with a mordint which helps the natural dyes bind and become permanent with the fiber. For wool yarn, you will need some alum. You can find this in the Spice aisle in many grocery stores since some people use it for picking and canning. If you check the ingredients, you'll see that it says potassium aluminum sulfate. That's exactly what you want to use. If you're going to be doing a lot of natural dyeing, though, it is more cost effective to purchase it in larger quantities from natural dye suppliers. You can see this says potassium aluminum sulfate, which is exactly the same as that grocery store alum. Addition to the yarn, you will need a piece of fabric. The fabric is not really important to this process as far as what type it is. I have a piece of silk here. This is what I use in my bundle dye fabric class, so I have some silk leftover from that. I also have a piece of just plain lightweight cotton. You want a piece of fabric because you're going to be adding natural dyes, little bits of flowers or leaves or roots right onto the fiber, and we need a way to keep it together with the yarn. The way we're going to keep the dye materials and the yarn together is by wrapping it with this piece of fabric. This reason, I recommend having a piece of cloth that is a couple inches bigger than the yarn. You can check to see if your fabric is the right size by laying the yarn down and spreading out the strands as much as possible to create some more surface area, and then see if the fabric is a little bit bigger than all sides. This is just about perfect. Because this cloth that we're going to use to wrap the yarn is just serving a purpose of keeping the yarn and dyes bundled together. It's not really important if this fabric is mordinted. If it's not mordinted, then those colors might make a little bit of a stain on here, but won't be permanent. If you do want the colors to be vibrant and beautiful, even on this cotton fabric that you use to wrap your yarn, then you will need to mordint it. Cotton fiber comes from a plant, and plant fibers work differently than the animal fibers like wool and silk. So the mordenting of cotton is a little bit more complicated just that it takes more than one step. You will want a different form of alum called aluminum acetate. And this is a specialty product that you can't find in a supermarket or probably not a local store. This will likely need to be ordered from someplace that sells natural dye supplies, and I share some resources in one of the files. And mordantin cotton is a two step process. After the aluminum acetate is added to the fabric, you need to finish it with some chalk. Or calcium carbonate. I buy this as a powder at my local natural food store. You can also use an antacid tablet like Tums, because the main ingredient in those is actually calcium carbonate, and you can crush it up and use it just like you can this powder. And again, this step of mortentin cotton is completely optional. You don't have to get these ingredients and do this process. I give a little more information about it in the lesson where I talk about mortentin cotton. Now that you have some suggestions of what yarn and fabric to gather for this project, the next lesson, I will share a wide range of natural dyes that you can use to make beautiful color on your yarn. 4. Natural Dyes: This is the most fun supply choosing the natural dyes that will make beautiful color on your fiber. If you recall from the earlier video where I talked about choosing wool for this project, these dye materials are going to be placed directly on your yarn fiber. This means that all the little bits and pieces of the natural dyes that we put on here to make color are going to get a little bit stuck in the yarn, and we'll have to get them out later. For that reason, for this yarn dyeing project, all of the natural dyes that I'm showing you are ones that are fairly large pieces of plant material. Large pieces of flower petals or roots from plants will fall out of the dyed yarn pretty easily. Some natural die suppliers sell natural dyes in powdered form. They'll take the dry flowers or roots or bark and grind it up into a powder. It's really easy to store that way. It takes up less space. It's easier to mal. And it can be really fun to use these powder dies. But can you imagine putting a powder in your yarn and then trying to get all of that out at the end? It would be nearly impossible. So if you have some natural dyes already at home and some of them are in a powdered form, save those for a different project. We're just going to use whole materials to dye the yarn. I'm going to show you a few flowers, and I have dried examples of those because I'm filming this in the early spring and my flowers are not yet blooming outside. But if you have fresh flowers, you can absolutely use those just the same way. This beautiful bright orange is from marigolds. These are the flowers I've dried from last year. These big parts on the bottom of the flower are full of seeds and don't really make any color. It's just the petals. So I tear them off with my fingers or use a pair of scissors to cut them, and then would sprinkle just the petals on the fabric. It makes this beautiful golden color. The other flower I have here is reopsis. They don't look like much when they're dried because they shrivel up so much, but they're really beautiful blooming and easy to grow in pretty much any climate. I love these because they make kind of a neutral color. So browns, but bits of golden orange, as well. And you see that variation in color on the yarn. These are two really common dye plants that I grow here on my farm. They're also easy to find because every place that sells natural dye supplies and natural dyes will carry these. They are dyes that have been used for centuries and have been proven to be very colorfast and make some beautiful color on fiber. This one here is matter, and this is the root of the plant. You can see this big chunk of the root. Often when you buy it, it's in small pieces. You can also buy this as a powder. So if you're ordering this online for this project, be sure that you are getting these pieces of whole roots and not a fine powder. Matter makes this beautiful reddish orange color. This is silk fabric, and then wool yarn. One thing to note about matter is that the color does not spread very far from where that piece of root is on the fabric. You see how much white space there is here and you can see the little marks, little rectangular shapes from each little piece of root. Compare that to the marigold, where the color really bled and spread out far from that individual spot where the petal was touching. So with the marigold, it's fairly easy to end up with a lot of color on the fabric, and matter is often a little more speckled. This bright yellow is weld. It grows these tall flower spikes, and every part of the plant makes beautiful yellow from those flowers to the leaves to the bits of stem, and it makes a really beautiful bright yellow. I'm a sucker for some jewel tones, and here we have some bright pink and purple. This purple color is log wood, which is another dye that's fairly easy to find from suppliers that sell natural dyes. This comes from the wood of the logwood tree, and you can buy it in these little small shavings. It makes this gorgeous purple color. And the bright pink is another classic natural dye. This is the only one I'm showing you today that is actually not from a plant. These come from an insect. The insect is called cochineal. And these little tiny pieces, they feel like hard little rocks or seeds are actually the exoskeletons from the insect, and they contain this really powerful bright pink dye. If you've taken my fabric bundle dye class, you might remember that I recommend grinding the cochineal into a fine powder to get more even coverage on the fabric. Because we're adding these directly to the yarn, a fine powder, again, will be nearly impossible to get out of the yarn. So I recommend keeping these in their whole form. It does mean that they're going to be a little more spotted on the fabric and on the yarn. But they do give a lot of color, and it tends to spread pretty far from where that little cochineal is on the fiber. So it will make some beautiful saturated color, even without grinding it into a powder. Last two examples I have to show you are again in that yellow and orange family, which is because honestly, that is the most common color to get from plants, even though we see green with our eyes so much out in nature, green from chlorophyll is not a stable di compound. It won't make permanent color, and a lot of plants have yellows and orange inside of them. I think it's a really beautiful color, and the range of lemon yellows to more golden oranges is really beautiful, chances are you have something near you that can make this color. First is onion skin, which you probably have in your kitchen. I keep a jar on my counter and just toss them in whenever I'm cooking, and then I can use it in my dye projects. It makes this beautiful golden yellow. Both on the yarn, there's this range of golds and yellow colors. And on the fabric, I think it looks really neat because you see these big pieces or areas of color from those pieces of onion skin. Another dye you may have access to is Osage. This comes from the Osage tree which grows in the United States and is often used for woodworking. So if you have a friend who's a woodworker, they may have some sawdust for you to use. You can see it's these curls of the Osage wood. And it also makes this beautiful yellow color, both on the yarn and fabric. This one got contaminated oops. This got contaminated with a little bit of coach neil, which is what that pink is from. But these yellow colors are really lovely. And these are by no means the only natural dyes that you can use. This is just what I have available in my studio right now to show you. In my bundle dye class here on Skillshare, I share other natural dyes that are easy to grow or find in neighborhoods and backyards. So check that out if you'd like some other suggestions. You certainly don't need all of these natural dye materials to make some beautiful yarn. Even just one item like marigolds from your garden or onion skins from your kitchen will make some gorgeous yarn. So choose a couple of things for this first project. I will share lots of examples of different combinations of these natural dyes further on in this course. But first, let me show you the few supplies and tools that you will need to dye the yarn. 5. Equipment: There are just a few additional supplies and pieces of equipment that you will need to dye your yarn, the beautiful colors that you choose. The first step of mordanting the yarn, remember that's adding the alum so that the natural dyes are permanent on the fiber. That does need to be done on a stove top. So you will want a pot that can go on the stove, big enough that when you put your yarn in there, you'll undo this. Imagine this is filled with water. You want enough room for the yarn to be able to be stirred around a bit and move freely. If it's too small and the yarn is bunched up, then it won't absorb that mort unevenly. So choose a pot that easily fits your yarn. To measure out the correct amount of alum to use for the fiber that you're dying, you'll want a little scale. You can use a postal scale or a kitchen scale, whatever you might have at home. When the urn and fabric are bundled up together, we'll need to keep that in a tight little bundle. And to do so, you will want some rubber bands to wrap around it or some string to tie your bundle together. To set the natural dyes, that, again, is done on the stove, so you'll need a heat source. And this is going to be done by steaming. So I have this steamer pot that I use can put water in the bottom and put the yarn and fabric on the top, and that steam comes up, and that's what extracts the color and makes it permanent. If you don't have a steamer pot at home, there are a couple ways you can kind of DIY something that will work. If you have a pot with two handles, you can tie or clip some cheesecloth across the top and create kind of a hammock to put your fabric and yarn in. You can even just put a brick or other heat safe object in the bottom of a pot, put a rack on top, and use that to steam it. You just need something to keep your yarn and fabric up above the water. Just a quick note about the pots that you use, whether for mordenting or for steaming your yarn, it's always best to use pots dedicated to natural dye projects and not use the same ones that you use to prepare food for yourself and your family. It's pretty easy to find pots at thrift stores. I buy all of mine second hand for just a few dollars. I keep my eye out for things the right sizes and the steamer baskets that fit these projects. Right, a couple last supplies are tongs. Your yarn bundle is going to be very hot and you'll need to turn it halfway through the steaming process, so some tongs so that your fingers don't burn. And then an optional supply is a spray bottle of just plain water in here. You don't need this, but it will make things a little easier bundling up your yarn. Now that we've talked about yarn and natural dyes and the supplies that you need, let's head to the next lesson where I will share the very important first step of mordanting your yarn. 6. Mordanting Your Yarn: In this lesson, I'll cover mordenting your yarn. This is the critical first step of applying alum to your yarn so that the natural dyes will be permanent on your fiber. This process I'm going to demonstrate is the same one that you would use on silk. So if you have silk fabric that you want to use to wrap up your yarn and want to mordent that, or if you have silk yarn itself, then use the same process for these fibers as well. All of the dye plants I showed you in the previous lesson do need a mordent to be permanent except for one, and that one outlier is onion skins. It's what's called a substantive dye, which means it does not need a mordent to be permanent on your fiber. Although onion skins do give off a slightly different color depending on whether or not the fiber is mordented. This yarn here at the top has a lot of those yellow and gold colors, and this is yarn that is mordinted with alum. This yarn and silk fabric at the bottom has not been mordinted, and in some light, you can see a little hint of yellow on this yarn, but it's much more coppery brown. Mordent comes from the French word that means to bite. So I like to think of it as a substance that bites on to the fiber and also bites on to the pigments from the natural dyes and permanently links them together. It's a little more complicated of what goes on when you add the mordint to the fiber. But the end result is that your dyes will be beautiful and permanent. So let's get started. I buy alum in a large quantity and store it in a jar, so this is what I'm going to be using. The first step is to weigh your yarn. This is important because it will tell us how much alum that we need to mordant it. If your yarn has a label on it, then it will tell you how much it weighs. You can see here that this gain is 100 grams. I always use grams to measure. It's just easier to do the calculations. But if your yarn doesn't have a label or you've divided it up into some smaller amounts, then you need to weigh it. I'm going to just ball this up so it fits on my scale here. That weighs 108 grams. When you weigh your dry yarn, write this number down so that you remember it. And the next step is to get the yarn wet. Wool takes a while to become saturated with water. That's one of the great qualities of wool. But when mordanting and also dyeing, we want to pre wet it so that it will absorb the dye, and in this case, the mordant evenly. I just soak it in plain tap water, squeeze it a little bit to help it start absorbing the water. It could take a while for it to get fully wet, so plan ahead a little bit for this. While it soaks, let's determine how much alum we need to mordint it. The amount of alum I recommend is using 8% of the weight of the fiber. If my fiber weighed exactly 100 grams, that would mean I would use 8 grams of alum. Since my yarn weighed a little more, it was 108 grams. We just need to do a simple math equation. Multiply the weight of the fiber by 0.08. In my case, the yarn weighed 108 grams, multiplied by 0.08, I get 8.64. I'm going to round up and measure nine. It'll be a little easier. Again, we're doing this in grams. I'm going to use this dish to measure. I don't want to weigh the dish, so I'll push the zero button, so I'm back at zero, and now I'll add the alum until I get to 9 grams. Now you just add that alum to your pot of water. Give it a little stir to help it start dissolving. Once your yarn is fully wet, you can add it to this pot of alum and then put it on the stove and heat it. You want to slowly heat it to just below a simmer. If you have a thermometer, the ideal temperature is about 190 degrees Fahrenheit. But I just look for the time when tiny bubbles start to form. Once it reaches this temperature, keep it there for 1 hour and gently rotate the fiber a few times to make sure that it's evenly absorbing the mordant. After the yarn has been at this temperature for approximately an hour, turn off the heat and let it cool to the touch. You can even leave it overnight to cool completely. Once you can safely handle the fiber, remove your yarn and give it a gentle rinse to remove any excess alum. At this point, you can dye your yarn immediately, or you can dry it and store it to use another time. If you do that, be sure to label it so that you remember it's already mordinted. 7. Optional: Mordanting Cotton: Oh. In this lesson, I'll share one way to mordent cotton, which, as I said earlier, is completely optional. Here is an example of cotton fabric that has been mordinted here on the left, and this one on the right has no mordint. Both pieces of fabric were wrapped around yarn that I dyed using weld to make this bright lemon yellow, marigold to make this golden orange color, and then cochineal for the pinks. Both of these have been washed in my washing machine, and you can see that the mordinted fabric has a lot more coverage of color. In fact, this one with no mordint really didn't pick up any of those bright yellow colors from the weld. Does have some coloring, though, from the cochineal and the marigold, though the colors are much more muted and they're likely to fade even more as it's washed or exposed to light. So you can see that you do not need to mordent your cotton wrapping fabric, but if you want vibrant colors that last like on this piece over here, I'll show you how to mordint it. You will need a pot big enough for your fabric to fit in and move freely around a scale to weigh your fiber and the ingredients which are aluminum acetate and chalk. Just as with mordentin the yarn, we're going to start by weighing the cotton because that will tell us how much of the mordant that we need. I'm measuring again in grams, and I'm just going to fold this up a little bit so that it fits on my scale. My piece of cotton weighs 42 grams. Just as with the wool yarn, take the time to pre soak your piece of cotton so that it will absorb the aluminum acetate evenly. The best practices for mordentin cotton always require more than one step. There are several ways to mordent cotton and you can find some additional recipes in the resources tab. This is my favorite method. It's a two step process, and the first one is to add aluminum acetate, and you'll want an amount that is equal to 5% of the weight of the cotton fabric that you're mordanting. So my piece weighed 42 grams. If I multiply that by 0.05, I get 2.1 grams for the alum mordant. I'm going to round that down and measure out two. Well, put on my little dish, hit the zero button, so I'm just weighing the alum. The aluminum acetate mordant does not need to be heated on the stove, but it does need to be hot. I'm using a heat safe pot and filling it with tap water on the hottest setting. Once it's filled, add the aluminum acetate that you've measured out and stir it to dissolve. When the cotton is fully wet, add it to the pot with aluminum acetate and gently press out any air bubbles to make sure that the fabric is fully submerged in the liquid. My fabric seems a little bit squished in here, so I'm going to add some more water to the pot. This looks a lot better. There's more room for that fabric to move around when I stir it, and this is just what you want it to look like. Leave your fabric to soak for one to 2 hours, but come back a few times during that soaking period and gently stir your fabric. This helps ensure that folded areas get opened up and don't stay scrunched up the whole time, and it helps the fabric evenly absorb the mordant. Once the cotton has soaked for one to 2 hours, you can remove it from the mordant. When you remove the cotton from the mordant, squeeze out any excess liquid and then hang it up to dry. Drying is an important step in this process. You will want it to be fully dry before you move to the second step of adding the chalk. Adding chalk to the fiber is an important part of mordantin cotton because it helps neutralize the acidity of the aluminum acetate and helps remove any excess aluminum acetate that's not bonded to the fiber. You'll want to use the chalk or calcium carbonate powder at the same amount as the aluminum acetate mordant, which was 5%, in this case, 2 grams. This step of adding chalk also does not need to be done on a stovetop, so I'm using a heat safe bowl and using hot water from my water kettle. Add your measured amount of chalk or calcium carbonate and stir it to dissolve. Then take your completely dry cotton fabric and submerge it in the chalk bath. It'll take a few minutes for the cotton to absorb the liquid. I like to stir it a little, but sometimes I find I have to just get my hands in there and open up the folds of the fabric so that it will evenly absorb and get fully saturated. Let your cotton fabric soak in this chalk bath for 15 to 30 minutes. I like to stir it again at least one time during this soaking process. After 30 minutes, remove it from the chalk bath and rinse it gently with clean water to remove any excess chalk. Just like with Mordenting the yarn, you can dye this fabric immediately or dry it and label it and store it to use another time. 8. Dyeing Your Yarn: Have arrived at the fun part of this course. Actually putting the dye plants onto the yarn to make some beautiful color. For this, you will, of course, need your mordented yarn, and it needs to be wet. So if you have come right from the mordenting step and your yarn is already damp, then you're good to go. If you mordented it a while ago to save for a later day, and today's the later day that you're going to be dyeing it, then you will want to soak it in water until it fully absorbs the water and is completely saturated. You don't want it dripping. You can see there's no water coming down from here, so I squeezed it out really well over this sink, so it's definitely wet all the way through, but it's not sopping. You will also need your fabric to wrap the yarn in. I'm just using some thin cotton muslin. Mine is not mordinted. I don't really care today if the dies stick to here permanently, you'll get to see what that looks like when we finish this example. You'll also need your natural dyes. I'll show you what I've chosen in just a second, your spray bottle and some string or rubber bands to wrap up your yarn, dyes and fabric when you're done putting it together. The dyes I've chosen for this example are marigolds and reopsis flowers from my garden and a little bit of cochineal because I just can't resist that pop of pink. This is a lot more cochineal than I'll need because these are really potent sources of dye. They'll give a lot of color. You can see the marigold is just the petals. And I have a mix of yellow flowers and orange flowers. Either color will make this beautiful gold on the yarn. To get just the petals, I take a dried flour and pull all the petals towards one direction. You can tear them off with your fingers, but I find it easier to use some scissors. And sometimes they fly a little bit, so I'm gonna scooch that out of the way and snip a few more off so you can see. That looks like it'll be plenty of marigolds. So these are the three colors I expect to have on my finished yarn, and they are going to look really lovely together. I'm not going to have them in the same amounts here. I'm just going to have a little bit of that pink and more of the other colors. Once you've chosen your dyes, lay your fabric out, and then place your yarn on top, spreading those strands out as much as you can. I find that dry fabric can shift around a little bit, and I want it to stay in place while I'm working. So that's where the optional spray bottle comes in. I'm going to sprit this cotton fabric with some water just to help it stay in place. You can see it kind of makes it stick to the table a little bit. So now as I move the yarn around, I'm not going to be bunching up the fabric along with it. I like to place the dies that I use in the center of my yarn here. That way, when I inevitably drop some pieces or spill it a little bit, those dye materials are still on the fabric, and they'll get all rolled up with the yarn and still add their color to the mix. Yarn has a lot of surface area, and it's impossible to spread it out completely. The dyes will impart a lot of color, but that color doesn't travel through very many layers of fiber. If all my natural dyes stay just on the top of the yarn, then the middle and the bottom layers will stay white. So to get color everywhere, lift the yarn up and get the dyes right in there all throughout the skin. As I've said earlier, don't worry about getting all these bits and pieces out of the yarn at the end. They really do come out a lot easier than you might expect. So don't be afraid to really shove the natural dyes right in here amongst all the yarn. Pay special attention to the places on this g that have the ties across it, because the yarn can't spread out as much in these areas. I like to lift up the ties and really get some of the dye material right in there to make sure that the color gets all throughout the yarn. Cochinel is a lot smaller than the dry flowers, so it's a little harder to see it on the yarn, but I'm getting some tucked into it on the top in the middle and even underneath. Even though they're small, cochineal gives off a lot of color, and I don't want a lot of pink on this yarn. Just a few pops of color. Now that I've added some of each of the three natural dyes that I'm using, the marigold, the cochineal, and the choreopsis, I'm going to go back and add a little more of each one. The way my camera is set up, I can't walk all the way around the table right now, but usually I like to do that so that I can look at the yarn from all sides and make sure that I'm adding the dies evenly. I can tell from here that I'm putting a lot more of these die materials on the side closest to me because it's easier to put it here than reach across. So I'm going to make an effort to reach across the table and get some dies on the other side. But I recommend looking at your yarn from a few different angles to make sure that it looks even. Before I roll it up, I want to show you what this yarn looks like up close. You can see how these dye materials are distributed all throughout the yarn to get color in all the areas. This is going to make some beautiful color, so let's bundle it up. Now it's time to roll it up, and I start by folding in the corners of the fabric. When you do this, you don't want to fold the yarn over. You want the yarn to stay as spread out as possible, just the way it is. So just gently fold the fabric over. And if your corners don't fold in very much because your fabric is smaller, that's totally okay. Just fold them over as much as you can. It helps the dye materials all stay in here once you roll it. I'm going to give these a little sprits of water to help the fabric kind of stick together. It'll make it a little easier to roll. Start from any side you want and start rolling it up. You want to roll this up as snug as you can. You can't hurt the yarn, and it's okay if the dye materials get a little smushed up in there. The closer in contact those diplants are with the yarn, the better color you'll have. When I get to the end, I pull this little edge of the fabric over and tuck it inside just to help keep all those diaplants inside. Now that you have a long tube of fabric and yarn, roll it the other way like a snail shell. You might find that it's stiff and bulky at the end, so it might feel a little more like folding than rolling at the beginning. Just find a spot where it bends pretty well, fold it over, and then you can start rolling it up. Just like rolling it into the tube, you want to roll it as snug as you can so that everything is packed tightly together. Once it's coiled up, secure it with some rubber bands or tie some string around it to hold it together in this shape. I This bundle is a little damp because we started with wet yarn, and then I sprayed the fabric a little bit throughout this process. But it's really important that this bundle of yarn and fabric is completely saturated with water. Water is necessary to extract those colors from the natural dyes. And also, if this were to dry out during the heating process, fabric and yarn can actually burn. So before this is heated, get it really wet. I hold it under the faucet and give it a few gentle squeezes to help that water get all the way into the middle. Now that it's good and wet, let's head to the next lesson where I show you how to heat this to extract all those beautiful colors. 9. Unbundling and Washing Yarn: Now that you have a colorful bundle of yarn and fabric, it's time to unroll it and see what you have created. I see browns and gold and pink, just the colors I was expecting, and I can't wait to see what it looks like on the yarn. You'll want to start by removing all of the rubber bands. Even though the outside has cooled to the touch, this inner part of the coil might still be really hot. So as you unroll it, just be careful. You can always let it sit and cool longer. There's no harm in letting it stay even overnight. I see a lot of pretty colors on the fabric here. It's a little hard to see what the yarn looks like at first because all those dye materials are still going to be in there kind of getting in the way. So I'm not going to be able to see the colors that are actually on this yarn until I get some of these big pieces of wet flowers off of it. A lot of the big pieces will fall off with this initial shake. I like to shake it off over the fabric for a little bit to get those big pieces off. And then you can take this fabric and bring it outside. Put those flour pieces on the compost or somewhere out in your yard where they can decompose or just toss them in the garbage. I'm gonna go do that and be right back. I decided to just bring the yarn and everything out here and give it a good shake over the railing. I find that shaking it giving it a good slack in the air helps get those big pieces of plants out of it. I don't see anything really in here. There may be some tiny little bits. But it seems pretty well free of those die plants. And this fabric, look how pretty this is. Some of it's gonna wash out because this fabric is not mordinted. This trees dripping on me. I rained earlier today, but it's dry now. I was saying, Some of this will wash out because this cotton is not mordinted. But right now it looks really beautiful. And so does this yarn. I'm going to show it to you up close. This yarn is looking just the way I was hoping. Kind of earthy browns and golds and little specks of that bright pink from the cochineal. Look at all those colors. I love the amount of undyed yarn that's left in here. It's gonna look really beautiful and just add another color to it when it's knitted up into some fabric. You can see there's really no more little bits of marigolds or reopsis. There could be a little cochineal stuck onto a piece of yarn somewhere, but that will fall out when it dries. If your yarn still has some little bits of dye material in it at this stage, hang it up to dry, and a lot of those pieces will fall out once they're dry. It stopped raining here for the day, so I'm going to hang this on my drying rack outside and let the fabric and the yarn dry. Here is the yarn completely dry. You can see there aren't any big pieces of the marigold petals or opsis flowers, but there could be some little tiny particles still in here. Even though we didn't use any powdered dyes, some of the flowers break up into little pieces, and there could be some little dusty bits. Let's shake and see. It's a little hard to see on this plastic table, but there are some little bits of those dry dye materials that came out of this yarn. Giving it a wash will help get all those last little bits and pieces out. I start by soaking it in some plain water. I like to use my fingertips and open up the strands of yarn a little bit to loosen it up and allow some space for those little bits of plant materials to fall out of it. You will probably see some color come out of the yarn into the water, and that's a completely normal part of the process. It doesn't mean that you did anything wrong. There's always just a little bit of extra dye that didn't bind to the fiber, that'll come off into the water. And also, if there are some pieces of marigold petals or cochineal in here, then as that sits in the water and soaks, they have some more color that they will release into the water. It's a little hard to see, but there are some little particles of dye materials that have come out and are floating in the water. You can see that in my case, the water is fairly yellow. And remember, all of this yarn is mordinted, which means color can attach to it, and it can happen even during this washing process. If I were to let this sit, say, overnight in this water with the yellow coloring here, then that yellow dye can adhere to the parts of my yarn that are still white and just lead to more color on the yarn. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I just like to share that that's a possibility that can happen. Okay, here I've dumped the water out and refilled it, put the yarn in again. You can see the water is a little less yellow, but there's still some color in here with this second soak. And I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of soap at this point. I use this unicorn brand power scour. It's also what I use to wash the wool that are from the sheep we have here on the farm, but you do not need a specific wool wash. You could use some gentle dish soap or hand soap. Even a little bit of hair shampoo will work just fine. You don't need to scrub your yarn vigorously now that soap is added. I'm just going to gently swish it a little bit, and that soap is going to help loosen up the fiber and help get rid of this excess dye. Right? This has been soaking with the soap for just a little bit, and the water is not nearly as yellow as it was the first time, so I'm going to go ahead and drain this and then refill again with some clean water to rinse the soap off. I filled up my bowl with clean water again. My yarn has been in here a couple minutes, and you can see that the water is pretty much clear. If I still saw a lot of color or particles coming out of the yarn, then I would want to dump this, fill it with water and rinse it again. So continue doing this process of soaking for a little bit and then rinsing your yarn until the water is very nearly clear. This looks pretty good for this skein of yarn, so I'm going to squeeze out as much water as I can. So here's my finished yarn. I love the way that it looks, but it is still wet, and it'll change a little bit as it dries. Here's the cotton fabric I had wrapped around it. So I'm going to let the yarn dry. I'm going to put this cotton fabric in the washing machine and see what happens to it. And I'll come back and show you the final looks. Here's the finished yarn washed and dried and looking just beautiful. You can see those golden yellows from the marigold petals, the browns and darker golds and little greenish hints from the reopsis flowers. And then the little bits of bright pink from the cochineal. I knitted a little bit of it up and here's what that looks like. Can see all those beautiful shades of colors that came from just those three dyes. If I were to change anything about this yarn, I might add a little bit more of the pink. There is some on here, but it's not quite as prominent as I thought that it might be. It's still really beautiful, though, and I'm so happy with it. Here's the cotton fabric that was dyed with it. I find it really curious that the pink stayed around even after washing and drying and the yellows are much lighter, brighter yellow than it is on the yarn, and these dark colors on the yarn really didn't show up much on this cotton. Remember, this cotton fabric I did not mordant, so I expect these colors to fade even more over time, and especially if I continue to wash it. I love the way this speckled yarn turned out and the random assortment of colors that it has on it. But there are other ways that you can add the diaplants to the yarn to create different looks from more color to less color, even some stripes or color blocking. And I show you those in the next several lessons. I do like how this yarn turned out. Sometimes I'm not completely satisfied with my first go when I dye a skein of yarn. So if your yarn turned out a little less desirable than expected, don't worry because you can add more die plants and over diet, and I share that in this next set of lessons as well. 10. Bonus: Re-Dyeing Yarn: He so what happens if you don't love the way your yarn turns out? You can't remove color once you've dyed the yarn, but you can always add more. I'll show you an example of doing that to a skein of yarn. This skein of yarn isn't too bad, but I made it while I was teaching an in person class. It was my example. I was showing folks how to do the technique. And honestly, I was doing more talking than I was paying attention to what I was doing. You can see there's a lot of pink up here and pretty much no pink in this area, a little bit of yellow. And then you come down here and there's not much dye in this section at all. Let's do this and see the whole thing. Here's that big yellow section, not much pink at all. Here's a lot of pink and no yellow. So there's nothing really wrong with this skein of yarn, but I would like to add some more color and try to even it out, so it's a little more uniform all across the skin. Because I mordented this yarn before I dyed it, I do not need to mordint it again. Once fiber is mordented, that process sticks around forever, and any other dyes I add to it will bind permanently without remordenting. It does need to be wet, though. This skein of yarn has dried since I made it, so I'm going to soak this in some water and then come back and we'll add some more color. So I'm using the same silk fabric that I wrapped around it to dye with the first time. I've sprayed it with a little bit of water so that it sticks to the table and doesn't slide around too much, and then I've spread out the yarn. I have a little bit of cochineal here. I'm not going to add much to this yarn. Just a little bit over here where there wasn't any the first time, maybe this side of the yarn a little as well. Here I have some madder root, which I did use on this yarn the first time I dyed it, but not very much. In fact, I really only see some on this fabric in this little section over here, maybe a little bit in this corner. So I'm going to add quite a bit more of this to really add some more warm red tones to the yarn. And then you don't have to stick with the same dyes you used the first time. I feel like I have a lot of yarn with these reds and yellow tones, so I'm going to add some logwood to this to add some purple. Just like dyeing it the first time, I'm adding the dye materials all throughout the yarn, making sure to get some inside the middle of the yarn and underneath to make sure that that color gets all the way through. If your goal in re dyeing your yarn is to just add more overall color, then distribute your dye materials evenly this second time around. In this case, I'm hoping to even out the colors a little bit, so I'm putting more dye materials into the spaces that are a little more bare and not adding quite as much to the parts of the yarn that already had a lot of color. All the color already on this yarn is here to stay, and this matter root and logwood I've added on top of it is going to add so much more color. After adding all the dyes you want, bundle and steam your yarn just like you did the first time. Here's my yarn bundle right before I added it to the steamer, and here it is now. I've already removed the rubber bands, and look how much color there is on this. This yarn is looking so much more saturated in color than it did the first time I dyed it. This looks like a really successful re dyeing. So let's see what it looks like all washed and dried. I am so thrilled by how this turned out. Look at all the color on this yarn now. The bright yellow and bright pink that was there before is still visible, but the addition of more pink and red colors and that purple just ties it all in. And the whole skin now is pretty uniformly colored. There's no one part of it that looks really different than the rest, and this is going to be really fun to knit with. I've put a before picture of this yarn up in the corner so you can really see the result of dyeing it a second time. So if you don't love your yarn the first time, I hope this inspires you to dye it again and transform it into something that you love. So to recap, re dyeing your yarn can be a great way to fix something you don't like or just add some more color. You do not need to mordent your yarn again. The mortenting you did to the yarn before you dyed it the first time is sufficient. You can re dye your yarn anytime from right when you unbundle it. If you decide you want to change it, you can go ahead and do that. Or if you wash it and dry it and you pull it out a few months later and decide, you know, I think I'd like it to look a little different, then you can re dye it at that time, as well. When re dyeing your yarn, you can add more of the same dyes or add something completely different the way I added log wood the second time I dyed my skein of yarn. And then roll up and steam your yarn just like you did the first time. I would love to see any yarn that you dye the first, second, or even the third time. Feel free to share a photo of any of your dye work in the project section here on Skill Share. 11. Bonus: Dyeing Striped Patterns: In this lesson, I'm going to show you three ways of putting the diaplants on the yarn in particular patterns to create striped effects on the yarn. The first is creating short blocks of color along the skin. Here's an example of a skein of yarn that I dyed using a color blocking method to create some small sections of single colors or mostly single colors. When I laid the yarn out, I divided it up into some small sections along the length of the yarn. And each area, I put a single dieplant. I used logwood for the purple color. Ciopsis flowers for browns and golds, which really turned out with a lot of greenish hues on this yarn, which was really beautiful. And then madder root these red speckles for another section. And I alternated around the yarn. So madder, logwood reopsis and then I started again with madder logwoodcheopsis, and around until I reached the beginning. Because of the way this skein of yarn is rolled one way and then rolled another way, these areas of color didn't stay clearly defined. You can see that they bleed into each other a little bit. There's some purple speckles over here, and there's some reddish speckles in some of the other colors, but they still have some defined area of color, and it's really fun to knit with yarn like this because the colors show up in some unexpected ways. And you can see that they do blend together a bit, but there is a little bit of a striping pattern that you can see, especially with the purples. The purple shows up a little more clearly in the stripe pattern. This second example makes some larger stripy areas of color. My teenager actually died this skein of yarn, and when they spread the strands of yarn out to diet, they thought of it in terms of an outside ring and an inside ring. On the outside, they use marigolds to make this large area of gold and yellow. And on the inside, they use logwood for the purple and maderoot and I think a little cochineal for the reds. The result is these long loops of yellow around the outside and slightly shorter loops of variegated red and purple on the inside. This won't make perfectly defined stripes because some loops of yarn may be partly in the yellow section, and then some of it may have pulled into the center where it's a different color, but it usually does result in some visible stripes. Here is that same yarn wound into a ball and then a small sample of it that I've knitted. You can see it does have a subtle striped pattern to it with some larger areas of that golden yellow and other sections with that pink and purple variegation. This last striped example I have to show you is a two color pattern that results in a really clear distinction between the colors. It's rolled up and steamed in a slightly different way, so I'll show you the process. I start by laying out the yarn in a slightly more rectangular shape than I did with previous skeins. I'm going to use agua dye to make purple on this top half of the yarn. And some cochineal to make pink, and that I'm going to put along the bottom. I'm going to put them right up next to each other here at these midpoints to make sure that there's not a white stripe in between them, but I'm going to make some half and half yarn. Just as with previous demonstrations, I'm going to make sure that the logwood and cochineal are inside the skein of yarn and some are underneath. So I end up with even color throughout. I'm taking special care to make sure that the diaplants are getting under those areas where this yarn is tied and also making sure that the colors are touching each other right at these midpoints. God. Here's this beautiful logwood side, that's going to be purple. And then the other side with just cochineal, that's going to turn out pink. When I roll this up, I'm going to start from one short end and roll it in this direction. That's so that the colors will roll on top of each other and stay together. If I roll across this way, then as I start rolling from this direction, this cochineal here is eventually going to end up on top of the logwood section, and it will result in some blending of colors. I want to keep them completely separate from each other, so I'm going to roll from the short side. I've secured the ends with some rubber bands, and just want to show you that I'm not going to spiral it up like a snail shell like we did before, because if I do that, then this logwood yarn will be touching the cochineal on the other side. Again, I want to keep them separate. Instead of rolling it, I'm going to wrap it with string like making a mummy. I usually just tuck the end of the string under a rubber band at one end and then start spiraling the yarn down. The reason for wrapping it like this is to make sure that the dye materials and the yarn are firmly pressed together so that you will get the best color. I wrap it as snugly as I can. It's okay that the fabric bunches or wrinkles. It's all gonna help keep it together. When I get to the end, if there's enough string, I recommend going back the other way and just wrapping around it again just to make sure everything is really secure in there. You can tie the end of the string or I'm just tucking it under the rubber band again. It's holding just fine. If you have a long pot, you could leave it straight like this in your pot. I have this small round one, so you can bend this into a u or a circular shape and fit it in the pot. You'll want to run this under some water to get it fully wet and then steam it just as we did before. I was a little eager to unroll this. You can see it's still pretty hot, and there's steam coming off of it, but I can touch it without burning my fingers. And I just love seeing that these colors are so bright and vibrant and it really worked perfectly to have each color stay on its own side. Here's what this yarn looks like washed and dried. You can see this nice divide here between the purple and the pink sides, and it makes this beautiful two tone yarn. When it's knitted, it makes these nice dripes of pink and white and purple and white that have no mixing of the colors in between. I hope this has inspired you to play with color and create your own patterns with natural dyes. I'd love to see a picture of any yarn that you dye. Please share it in the project section. 12. Bonus: Color Combinations: There are so many color combinations that you can make using natural dyes. And these are just a few options. In my bundle die class, I share more examples of common natural dyes that you could include in this process, too. Here are some examples of color combinations that I've dyed using the natural dyes that I've shown right here in this course. I just love everything about the colors that come from natural dyes, and I hope that you do, too. I would love to see any color combinations that you create on your yarn. So please share photos in the project section. Or you can tag me on social media. 13. Final Thoughts: I'm so glad you joined me in this class to discover the beauty of natural dyes and how to use them to make gorgeous multi colored yarn. You have learned how to mordent wool yarn with a process that also works on silk, as well as the two step process of mordantin cotton so that the natural dyes bind permanently with these fibers. You've seen a variety of plants and even one insect that can be used as dye and learned what colors each creates. Now at the end of this workshop, you know several ways to combine dyes with the yarn to create different effects and the important step of steaming to extract and set the colors. I hope that you have learned something new about plants and look at the flowers in your backyard and even your kitchen cast offs with a different eye. I would love to see your naturally dyed yarn. You can share a photo here on skill share in the project section, if you have any questions about this process, you can leave that in the discussions tab. I check those periodically and can reply as soon as I'm able to. You can also tag me in a post on Instagram. My username there is Cedar Dale Forest Farm. I would also really appreciate if you leave a review for this class. It helps me know what you loved about it or how I can improve future classes, and it gives potential students an idea of what to expect with this course. Lastly, before you go, follow me here on skill share so you will be notified whenever I post a new class. Thank you so much for joining me today and for your interest in adding natural materials into your creative life.