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.

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?