Gradient Dying

Gradient dying is where yarn is dyed the same colour but in tones from light to dark. The tutorials I had seen for this involved adding yarn to the dye pot and gradually removing sections. This seemed very messy. I wondered what would happen if I used pots with different amounts of dye in them. I liked the pink that resulted from my first attempts with icing colours. So I bought some more Full O'Sheep to be dyed. Instead of winding into a hank, I divided it into four roughly equal balls in the hope that my end result would shade from light pink to dark pink. These were soaked in vinegar solution while I dissolved the dye in boiling water. Four pots with 1/8 teaspoon, 1/4 teaspoon, 1/2 teaspoon and 1 teaspoon Petal Pink icing colour.



One ball of yarn was placed in each pot, which I had placed in a casserole dish and then zapped in the microwave. This took a while. When I thought the water was clear I left the yarn to cool but when I went back to it the water had taken back the dye. In the end I left the yarn overnight gave it a final zap in the microwave the next morning and left it to cool. This seemed to do the trick.



I like the end result. You can see the section from the least amount of dye and the one with the most amount of dye but the middle two sections do not look much different from each other. I will try this again with a different yarn that is less fuzzy to see if that makes a difference.