Painting with Yarn Dying

Pretty much everyone knows that if you mix blue and yellow, you get green! I love painting, and mixing the colors is a really fun part of the process. If I don't have the right shade of orange, I can add yellow or red to an existing orange, or make a whole new one from those colors. I never don't have the right color with paint. With my knowledge of color theory from my college art days I feel confident that I can achieve any color in painting. Getting it to be the right shape is a whole other thing entirely. 

With yarn, I have almost the opposite problem. I can get it to be pretty much whatever shape I'm imagining, but I'm limited by the colors I already have. If I don't have the right shade of pink, I can't mix red and white, I have to BUY new yarn. Which isn't really great considering I have so SO much yarn. But anytime I start a new project I do end up buying more yarn even though I have so much, just because it's not the right color. 

A lot of fiber artists I follow on social media have started dying their own yarn. Some of this may be the algorithm showing me what it thinks I want to see, but I think a lot of it is the fact that creators get tired of being limited to what's available by manufacturers. So they just make it themselves.  I LOVE this idea, it's so refreshing, and it adds more to the handmade aspect of it, making it a more fine tuned piece. 

However, I suck at it. Or at least I thought I did! I tried tye dying in a group setting last year with not a lot of instruction, and the shirts came out less than spectacular.  So I though I was just awful at dying. But I tried again, with plenty of research done before hand, and more than enough time for the dye to soak the fibers, and they came out AMAZING! The only one that looked odd was one I tried to do a heart on. It's not awful, it still has a cool pattern to it and has beautiful colors! Just not exactly heart shaped.

But I think I know how to fix the heart if I want to try again, just because I tried and learned what didn't work. And I think that's the key to trying a new craft, just try! Just start. You'll mess up, but you may surprise yourself. And you'll learn lessons along the way to perfect it. 

So maybe one day I will try to dye my own yarn. I have a lot of research ahead of me regarding fiber content and dye properties, but that's part of the fun of learning something new. 

Have you ever tried something new and surprised yourself? Have you ever dyed your own yarn? Let me know in the comments, I'd love to hear! 

Thanks for reading, happy crafting!

- Becca the Craftmeister