Tie dying t-shirt yarn

Are you seeing the tie dye trend circling Instagram and the fashion circuit as much as I am these days? I feel like I’m seeing even more do-it-yourself tie-dying now, too, since kids are out of school and parents are looking for fun activities to do with them. With that at the back of my mind, I’ve been seriously researching dying my own yarn for awhile now, but have been too intimidated to pull the trigger. Well then the time came to order a large quantity of yarn for the basket designs, however there were very limited colors in stock, and just off hand, I said I should just dye my own on plain white yarn. Then I started thinking about it more and more and thought it would be fun to give it a try at least!

But then came the research of trying to figure out how to actually do that. Like I said, I have researched and looked into dying yarn a bit, but I always thought it would be for far off down the road when I would actually trying dying. I’m specifically interested in natural dyes and have been saving avocado skins (they dye yarn a pretty pink!) for my first foray into natural dying. However, I’m still a little intimidated what with the mordants, protein verse plant fibers and all the other factors to consider. So after a bunch of research about natural dyes versus acid dyes and how they take to different fibers, I recalled all of the tie-dye cotton t-shirts I’ve been seeing. And that’s exactly what this yarn is - recycled cotton-t-shirt offcuts so I thought why not use these for my very first foray into dying especially since they’re made specifically for cotton t-shirts! So I ordered a tie-dye kit and it worked perfect on this yarn!

You can even do it yourself if you chose, or if you just want a peak into the process, let me share it with you! These photos and process are all from my very first go at tie-dying yarn.

UPDATE: Our second time around dying with this yarn, we started to run out of dye and also noticed some dyes are much more pigmented than others. Instead of purchasing this tie-dye kit again, I’m going to try fiber reactive professional dyes and I’ll write another post about my experience dying with this.

Bare cotton yarn skeins — Winding and dividing the yarn into hanks

This yarn is 98% recycled cotton and 2% elastane so with the majority cotton, it’s perfect for these specific dyes. However the yarn comes in cones and the easiest way to dye it is to wind it into hanks, as pictured here. So that I could try several different tie-dye techniques, I divided the yarn into four separate hanks.

Weighing cotton t-shirt yarn skeins — Weighing the yarn

Next up, I weighed each hank for an idea of the amount of yarn and to make sure it would be enough to make one basket from each hank. (Small baskets are approximately 90-100 grams, and medium baskets are around 250 grams.)

Tie Dye Tools and cotton t-shirt yarn — Tools: Tulip Tie-Dye Kit

I definitely want to try out more natural dyes, but for my first time ever, it was important to me to keep it as simple as possible and work my way up to natural dyes. So I started with an all-in-one kit from Tulip! After checking reviews, it was the top recommended one available.

Preparing+to+tie+dye — Washing the yarn + prep your area

The very first step in the actual process, is a bit boring, but it’s dying the yarn. If you’re using a cotton t-shirt, throwing it in the washer is fine, but since this is yarn I thoroughly hand-washed it. But on the plus side, no need to dry it. It’s actually best to dye on damp yarn. Also, before you dye, make sure you safely prep your space! The kit includes a plastic table cover and gloves so just put these down to cover your table and skin.

Yarn dye helper — Enlist a helper

Now we’re ready to try out tie-dying yarn for the first time!

Additional yarn dye powder — Select your colors

We chose to work with only three colors to start that coordinate with one another for a less striking change in tone. We used purple, violet and turquoise.

spotted pastel tie dye yarn in progress.jpg — Apply the dye: Speckled technique

I don’t have pictures of us actually dying since we had gloves on and were into experimenting with the different techniques, but this turned out to be one of my favorites! It looks so spotted when you’re actually dying it, but once it’s knit up into a basket, the gorgeous shades of purple, violet and turquoise peek through the white.

Pastel shades of turquoise velvet and purple — Dye the yarn: Scrunched technique

Tulip has many videos about different dye techniques on their website and YouTube that you can check out for reference. We tried both the spiral technique and scrunching the yarn into a ball tied with rubberbands and found that they created the same end results. However, I’m sure it would be a different case when dying a t-shirt as show in Tulip’s videos.

Turquoise ocean dyed yarn — Using one color

I wanted to attempt to create an ombre or gradient effect with one color and we chose the turquoise to attempt this with! We squirted the turquoise dye directly on the yarn at first to create the darkest shades then we poured some out and filled it with water to try to get a lighter shade (per the instructions), but honestly it was still dark and we didn’t see much of a difference, so instead we poured the dye onto our (gloved) hands and applied it this way with our hands and that produced lighter shades. It was also helpful to fold the darker half on the still-white side of the yarn and this also created a lighter ombre effect.

Tie dye yarn finished and in plastic — Wrap the dyed yarn in plastic wrap

Wrap each section of yarn in its own plastic wrap and let it sit. I let it sit overnight and it ended up to be about 18 hours before I got to it the following day.

Color paper towel post dye — Take a pic of the fun paper towel

Tie dyed yarn still wet — The next day…

After letting it sit overnight, or however long you like, unwrap the yarn and now it’s time to rinse it again. I rinsed then washed then rinsed repeatedly until the water ran completely clear. I even scrubbed and irritated the yarn a bit to try to eliminate future bleeding. The turquoise gradient yarn barely ran at all, same with the speckled. However the other two bled quite a bit.

Wet tie dye yarn on arm displayed — Hang to dry

I love the way these yarns came out! I feel like the colors barely dimmed. But now the yarn has to dry and for this I hung it in on the shower. The lighter skeins dried within 12 hours, while the heavier skeins took about 36 hours to dry.

Tie Dyed finished yarn balls — Once dry, wind yarn into balls

Once the yarn is finally dry, I wound it into balls and they turned into these gorgeous products! Pictured here are the turquoise (left) and scrunch technique (right).

Pastel Speckled crocheted basket in progress — Then we crochet with it!

This is the speckled/spotted yarn that I crocheted into a small puff basket.

Thanks for following along on my fun yarn dying process! I can’t wait to share more techniques and methods I experiment with in the future. Please let me know if you have any advice or things you’d like to see!

Future dye techniques I want to try (and share with you!):

Natural dye (like avocados, onion skins, etc) on both cotton and wool and compare the difference
Kool-aid dye on wool
Natural solar dying (basically leaving the yarn outside in a jar for months!)
Ice dying (Yes, dying with ice)
Potentially some sort of professional acid dye?