so the boreal forest cow by Renee Callahan and I believe it's the second pattern of knit vent 2016 came up this morning and it's adorable I really would like to knit it but I don't keep a large stash of worsted weight wool yarn but what I do have in my stash at any given time is worsted weight bear will of the Andes for knit picks so it's a three color fair isle cowl and I'm gonna die up two skeins of my bear knit picks and I'm going to use one skein natural and I thought I would show you that process in this inaugural episode of knitting to die for you so to get started I've got a pot of water on the stove warming up should be proper and use a stainless steel pot but I've been using this one for over a year now and it seems to work just fine it was the cheapest plot at Walmart so for this quick dye job what I'm going to use is two skeins the wall BND superwash bear some Wilton's food coloring and I'm gonna use some citric acid because I don't have any vinegar at home but vinegar works just as well and so I'm going to die one skein with a combination of creamy peach and pink and the other scheme is going to be a combination of cornflower blue and teal so I thought I've got just enough water to cover my skein of yarn in fall and I'm going to add one teaspoon five mils of citric acid to the water as it's warming up and whisk that in so what I'm aiming to do as a tonal so I'm just gonna grab a little bit of the Waltons pink I'm just using a wooden chopstick here and add that into that doorbell was the mailman actually a mail woman and I'm pretty sure this isn't mrs. Brown's bag and I'm really certain that this is Hedgehog fibers coming all the way from Steven and Penelope so those will be on my Instagram anyways back to the dyeing so I use my handy dandy wooden chopstick to put a glob of the Wilton's pink into the pot and I'm gonna use my whisk to make sure that it dissolves completely as I can get to I've found that some of the wilton's colors probably can't hear me over this musing my whisk to dissolve it as completely as I can but you can see that some of the Waltons colors like to stay behind in chunks so hopefully enough aggressive bull skiing will get this to come into solution so nitpicks Keens come pre tied two points I've just gone ahead and added an extra two ties with some blue acrylic yarn and you'll notice that in contrast to every dyeing tutorial every dyeing set of rules you've probably ever seen my yarn is not pre soaked and I like to live dangerously and this is going to go right into the pot dry and you try and manage this with the camera in one hand and the whisk and the yarn in the other pot of hot water with pink food coloring in the citric acid and we're gonna go right ahead and put my dry yarn in and use the whisk to sink it down so you are supposed to in theory pre-soak here you are and every time and I've had really good results not bothering to pre-soak so we'll show you how this is gonna turn out and one of the tools that I like best for stovetop dying or dying in general anytime that your simmer seen in water is I have a white ceramic measuring cup with a handle so I can go in and test to see how much of the dye has cleared under the water and since pinks and Red's strike fast it looks like we're already fairly clear yeah I can go in with my chopstick and loop it through my acrylic yarn and pull out a scan which is essentially been dyed pink and the water is cleared um and then you can also see because it went in dry you can see that one side of this game that went into the water first is much Pinker than the other side of this game because the Pink's strike that fast so putting the dry yarn into the dye pot really does make the pink strike very quickly and you get some variation that way um I do want to add a little bit more of the Wilton's pink food coloring so I've just got a glob here on my chopstick and this time I'm going to go in to the pot that already has the yarn in it and that's gonna hopefully strike and continue the sort of arrogating or the tonal nature of this yarn this chopsticks a little bit rough so it's catching my yarn don't like that um better break it up because it closed in undissolved there we go it's in solution now and that will go ahead and strike rather quickly you can see that I've got pink in my water so let me give that some time with the heat to strike as far as temperature I've got my stove set to like 8 or high but I've got my pot on the tiny burner and so I found that this pot on the small burner set to high or close to high won't actually come to a boil there's just too much surface area of the pot that's not in contact with the burner so it's my perfect die pot right now um see if it's clear that's still a bit pink so we'll give that some more time in the meantime I'm getting my glaze ready so this is the creamy peach the vulcans creamy peach I just put a dollop into this glass jar and I'm just gonna add some hot water to the jar here's the husband thinks he's coloring in it from before and we're gonna go ahead and shake that into solution so back to our pot let's test them pretty sure all that pink is gonna have cleared out at the water by now you can see that the water is totally clear pinks and Red's die really fast and I've got my jar of the creamy peach solution and for interest sake I'm going to go ahead and just pour this on port about half in and this is just going to help to make some a variegated sort of glaze to this yarn it's gonna add dimension to the color move my yarn around a little bit more in over here lose my yarn around getting over here that's really that's the rest of it and then let that sit let's check our yard and test to see if the color has cleared from the water and the color has absolutely cleared from the water and then I've just grabbed the hair like tie my chopstick and you can see we have a semi-solid kind of coming all essentially thanks game Garen so this is just gonna come over to the sink and I'm gonna go ahead and rinse it because it's super wash I'm not gonna be super careful about letting it dry all the way to room temperature and then rinsing and like minded water temperature like temperature at water can't talk um I just sort of throw it in the sink and then let it cool off a little bit and then go ahead and rinse it off you use a little bit of dawn soap to wash it all right so I'm gonna go ahead and do the blue now so because my pink has pretty much essentially cleared out of my water I'm gonna go ahead and reuse the same dye water it's already hot and why do you wasteful if you don't have to I'm not gonna add another full teaspoon of citric I said just gonna add like maybe an eighth of a teaspoon in you don't actually exhaust the acid from the water so you can go ahead and reuse the same water with the same acid if you start to find that the colors aren't setting you can always add in a little bit more after the fact um so I have my second skein tied up and ready to go and this time I'm gonna go in with the teal first and then overlay some cornflower blue so I've stirred in my teal Wilton's food coloring just to give you a better idea of how much the water is going to clear this is the before amount died that i have in their water I find that blues sometimes don't clear all quite all the way but in the past I've done the food coloring blues with vinegar and we'll see if the citric acid makes a difference to help them clear a little bit better and again I've got a hot pot of water on the stove citric acid is in food coloring dye is in drywall is going in on top and you'll see it starting to strike right away and just use my whisk to push it down and fully submerge it and I'm not stirring as much as I am just sort of pushing the yarn around in the pot you wouldn't want to stir it's just gonna make a huge tangled mess and already you can see quite a lot of that color has cleared and struck to the air but we're gonna give it a couple minutes and test it again see if we can't get full clearance before we go on the place so it's been about another 5 minutes and my color has almost completely cleared from the water so I'm gonna go ahead and start glazing if you will with the cornflower blue so I'm going to just push my iron to the side a little bit and pour in I've just mixed up a little bit of the cornflower blue and some hot water pour it in there and move the yarn into it pardon the steam push my yarn to the other side of the pot or into the spot and then move the yarn into it I'm gonna do this corner and push the Aaron into it I'll go into the other side of the pot so empty spot in the water horse and diamond and push the yarn into us hinge go ahead and let that set and it's only been about five minutes and you can see that my color has cleared from the water and I step onto the iron so I'll go ahead and grab my tie and you can see that again we have a essentially tonal teal some darker areas and lighter areas so this one will go to the sink and get rinsed and washed and then they're gonna dry it'll probably take those about 24 hours to dry hanging up in my basement it's winter here so I can't dry them outside and then I will show you the final dried skins are going tomorrow and here's the finished games ready to be wound up and cast on so we have the teal and cornflower blue and you can really see some of the darker variations over the lighter color of course the undyed yarn and the pink with creamy peach overall I'd say it was a success