First, take your skein of yarn (I used 100% wool since I planned to knit a clothdiaper cover with it- you can use cotton as well which would give you the most accurate color results with procion dyes) making sure they’re loosely tied & soak them for thirty minutes in lukewarm water with a few tablespoons of dish soap & about a cup of white or apple cider vinegar.
Mix up three colors of dye. I used red mixed with more water than usual to tone it down to a vivid pink, yellow, & bright blue. Set the dye aside.

Get your crockpot ready by plugging it in & setting it at low once the thirty minutes are up.
Take your skein of yarn & wind it round & round in the pot like so:

Next, add at least two cups of vinegar & enough water so that you can just barely see it through the skein of yarn.

Now comes the tricky part! Take your three colors & apply them like you were shaping a pie:

You need to make sure any reds have the smallest “pie piece” because it will bleed- a lot.

Now you just let the crockpot “cook” the dye into the yarn. You’ll know when that happens because you will see the tone pick up (it should be pretty vivid) & the water *should* be clear. After about three hours on low, my skein was finished. Take out & let cool completely in a strainer.
Wash with dishsoap & lukewarm until the water runs clear & hang to dry, then leave as a skein if you won’t be knitting it for awhile or roll into a ball if you will use it right away.

I called this one Arboretum :cheery:

(I didn’t mark this activity as a “kid craft” because I used procion dyes for dyeing. If you substitute with Kool-Aid or food coloring then it would be kid safe.)

Posted in crafts, yarn & written by Niki —