so today i'm going to show you how to do a gradient style dyeing of yarn um so it would basically be one long gradient like this where it starts out at once one color and as you knit or crochet along it goes into a different color um it's actually really really simple to do what you're going to need is yarn um wool obviously or something that's at least 75 wool um and we're just going to roll it up into a big giant ball like this and you need it in a ball not in a cake or any other form because putting in a ball changes the way that it absorbs the color and for the color we're going to use just plain old food dye uh i got this just at local craft store it's pretty cheap um but the reason i'm using a food dye instead of an acid dye is because the food dye actually has so many varied colors in it that it's going to absorb those colors at different rates and will give you that really nice gradient look with all the different colors soaking through it and as for how much dye that really varies so much depending on how much yarn you're using the weight of the yarn the thickness all that kind of stuff so for this yarn i'm actually going to be using two colors so it's going to be this same color setup so starting at this is actually a black oddly enough starting out of black and going to this golden yellow so i'm gonna want to use enough of the dye to do just less than half of my yarn you don't want it to fully saturate so really what you're going to do is kind of start out with a little bit less than you normally would use if you're used to dyeing yarn if not i'd say a good starting point i usually use an eighth of a teaspoon start out with about that and see you can always add more you can't really take out dye and of course with this style you don't again you don't want it fully saturated you want the gradual change of color and the different shades just to come through so we've put the dye in there's also vinegar in there and so then we're just going to take your ball of yarn and drop it in carefully since the water is hot you don't want it boiling but you do want it to hot so see it's steaming not boiling because the boiling will potentially felt your yarn which it's not happy so we're just going to let that sit and absorb and every now and then kind of take some tongs and kind of twirl it around so that all of the sides are equally absorbing because the stuff on the bottom won't absorb quite as well because it's sitting up next to the pan rather than being surrounded by the fluids so we'll just let that sit for a while and absorb all right so it's been about 20 minutes as you can see there's still tons of dye left in the water but it's absorbing it quite nicely you can see there's lots of varying shades in there and it's getting down in there um you still there's still lots of white uh to go so we're gonna keep letting this sit and give a nice little turn so that it's all evenly exposed to the dye and we'll come back in a little while later and check on it again all right so it's been about another 20 minutes or so um there's still tons of dye in the water so it's definitely not done but as you can see the outside has definitely absorbed a lot more um you move aside you can see these inner layers not quite there um so i'm actually going to add a little bit more yeah vinegar kind of just help the process along and really i don't measure because well i'm lazy i guess so i'll just kind of let that mix in and let it continue absorbing all that color all right so it's been yet another 20 minutes uh maybe 30. but there's still tons of color in the water but you can see these outside layers are getting really really saturated with color and as we move them aside you can see the inner layers are definitely getting more color as well this process really is going to vary a lot on how long it's going to take depending on what color of dye you use the thickness of your yarn the weight of your yarn or how much yarn you have this is about 200 grams of worsted weight so it's there's a lot of layers for this color to go through so it's definitely gonna take some time um i'm gonna continue leaving it because it's definitely getting close uh with any of these food coloring guys that have blue in them it's gonna take a lot longer than if you were to do say yellow or something like that um for some reason the blue just does take a long time uh if adding more vinegar doesn't seem to help what you can do is remove it from the heat let it cool down and as it cools it will absorb more of that color so actually i'm going to go ahead and do that um see where we're at once all the rest of this dye is absorbed all right so this is all cooled off um there's still a little bit of blue left it's kind of hard to see but you can see in there there's just a tiny bit left in the water but that's not a huge deal pull this out we can see it's definitely absorbed a lot of color so let's kind of look a little deeper inside and see what it looks like you can kind of pull these layers apart and see that it saturates down it gets lighter and lighter and lighter looks like it'll probably go pretty close to halfway so that is perfect so i will take this out of the water now let it drain a little bit squeeze out some of the extra water and then we will wash it or rinse it at least and get going on the other color all right so we are here at the sink we're just going to kind of give this yarn a bit of a rinse you don't need to wash it just yet uh we'll do that all the way at the end but we want just kind of some of that excess dye you can see there's just a teeny tiny hinge of blue so we're just gonna kind of give it a rinse squeeze it around a little bit and get out some of that extra dye and then i'm going to take this colander let it sit in there and then just kind of put my bowl on top and give it a squeeze get some of that extra water out we don't need it dry because we're just going to dye it again but since we're going to be unwinding it and winding it up again we don't want a ton of excess water splashing all over because that's kind of messy so we'll let that sit for just a bit let's then we'll come back and unwind it and wind it up again alright so i started rewinding the ball of yarn into a different ball uh starting just grab the outside of the yarn and start winding it up and you can really see all the varying colors that we have here and it's going to get lighter and lighter as we go through this ball so you just start at the beginning or the outside end of the yarn and start rolling it into a new one and just keep going this is kind of one of the most time consuming parts about making this gradient style of dyed yarn is all of the winding and unwinding that you have to do it's definitely i mean i've had it take anywhere from two to four days to go through the whole entire process uh between winding unwinding dying and then drying so it's definitely takes a bit of time so you can see we're starting to get some of these lighter colors in here and this is really going to vary a lot depending on the thickness of your yarn i mean a bulky yarn is going to die up a lot differently than a sock yarn or sport weight just because you know the more layers of yarn it has to go through the more varying the colors are going to be so it's really just kind of a experiment almost um you kind of never quite know how it's going to turn out any urine dying that you do is going to be just kind of more of an art than a science it's you can come up with some really really crazy results uh when i first did this one i did not at all expect this black to turn out the way it did which actually is a lot of fun i kind of like it it's my favorite color to use for this gradient style of dyeing so there you have it i'm just going to keep up with this uh rolling up the yarn and i'm also gonna go feed my hungry baby who thinks she needs more food so i will be back all right i am about halfway done now i know this because i found the knot um because i'm doing 200 grams instead of 100 which means i basically just took two things of yarn and tied them together um but as you can see this is pretty well gone um and there'll be a tiny bit more blue just some spots here and there but it's gone through pretty much half of it i ended up using a quarter teaspoon of dye to do approximately 100 grams so that's probably you know kind of a good starting point if you're only doing 100 grams total quarter teaspoon of dye is probably going to be adequate so again start out with less than you think you might want because you can always add dye but you can't take it away but yeah it looks like there's definitely some great color variances in here um it's going to continue looking having just those little spots of blue and the other end we're going to do a golden yellow which when it mixes up with these spots of blue i'll make a really cool green color so it's got a really really great effect so i'm going to continue winding this and get ready to dye the other end all right so we are ready to dye the second color of our yarn um i'm going to be using this okay you see it golden yellow here um i'm going to go ahead and do a quarter of a teaspoon about the same amount that i did on the previous and the black um because i know that's basically gonna get me to just over halfway which will get a great blend of colors right in the middle um and this stuff doesn't want to dissolve so i'm just gonna kind of give it a little whisk all right then i've already put some vinegar in so all that's left to do is take our dye or our yarn and carefully place it in and i'm actually going to add a little bit more water to this because as you can see it's not quite covered and then we will just leave this on a low heat you don't want it boiling again because that could felt your yarn and no one wants that so we're just gonna leave it on a low heat uh hot enough to set the dye but it's not hot enough to boil and we'll let that sit for a while and come back and check on it okay it's been about half an hour um though a lot of the color has been absorbed but it's not nearly as dark as i would like so i'm going to go ahead and add a tad bit more color here probably just go ahead and go with another eighth of a teaspoon because i want this to be a nice dark orange and i have to get a whisk and get that mixed in sometimes this gel dye doesn't like to dissolve okay that's pretty good so we will let that sit a little while longer and come back at some point and check on it again all right so we are pretty well done here with the die you can see it's definitely absorbed most of the color and really i'm gonna say it's probably good enough put it here in a bowl and kind of just take a look move things around you can see it gets this great golden yellow mixed in with some of these flecks of blue so it's actually gonna look really really cool so i am going to let this cool down a bit and then we will wind it up on the yarn winder and get it washed and ready to go all right so we've got our yarn now um all dyed ready to go i'm gonna go ahead and get some lukewarm water because you don't want to get too cold if it's still warm that'll shock it and actually felt it and we don't want felted balls of yarn because what would you do with that so we're just going to rinse it off a little bit um kind of squeeze get some of that excess dye off in case there is any and this doesn't seem to have any so and again i'll just kind of squeeze out the excess water uh and just get as much of that out because we're going to now wind it up um and let it dry and more water that's out of it the better it will be all right so that's probably pretty good and we'll get out the yarn swift and wind it up and be ready to go all right so i've got my yarn all wound up here on the yarn swift and you can see kind of the progression of color um it kind of starts out with this bold orange gold light yellow mixes with the blue and it gets darker to it almost black so we're going to take this string and just kind of wrap it in there and tie it around and this will help keep it from getting pickled up when it's drying and it will pull this off the yarn swift and i'll give you a better view of what it looks like so here's our yarn you can really see the progression of colors here and it's going to knit up or crochet either way really really beautiful um so we'll let this dry it'll probably take one to two days uh it's a lot of yarn and then i will show you what it looks like when it's all right okay so i lied there's still one more thing left to do we have to wash it and so just fill up your sink with warm water not too hot not too cold um you can really use just about anything to wash your wool yarn um obviously there's products designed specifically for that i usually like to use something as simple as you know hand soap dish soap body wash shampoo you name it basically it's okay for you to use it's probably okay for your yarn so fill this up a little bit toss in a little squirt of soap and you don't want to work the yarn too much um you don't want it to get tangled you don't want it to get felted uh we're just going to kind of swish it around and you can see there's a little bit of that residual yarn or die that's getting washed out okay so we'll just kind of smush it around this is why we don't want the temperature of the water hot because if we had a hot and then we're agitating the yarn it's just gonna felt all right so go ahead and let that drain rinse it a bit extra soap and dye out it seems to be rinsing pretty clear so i think they are good continue letting that sink drain um all right another thing i like to do is just kind of wrap it around there give it a good twist just get out all that extra water help it dry a lot faster another thing you can do is kind of twist it up like that um wrap a towel around it and then step on the towel that'll help push out all that extra water as well so you can really see these great colors so cool i'm very excited with how it turned out um so hopefully my customer will be as well so now that we've washed it we will go ahead and let it dry and then we will see the finished product so our yarn is all dry ready to go you can see really well the gradient here with the orange getting lighter and then to a light blue and finally that dark dark blue let's go ahead and unwind it here and you can see the full color so there we go i've got this bright bright orange at this end i'm going all the way to this great dark navy here so this is going to work out really really neat when it's done so it's ready to go ready to be made into a project if you make a yarn using this technique i would love to see how it turns out you can post a photo on my facebook page and show me a picture and i would love it so good luck have fun and enjoy