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Apr. 1st, 2020 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreAvocado dyeing time!
First! You get a bunch of avocado pits and put them in a big pot full of water. I don't eat avocados myself, but my parents are fans of guacamole, so I've been stealing their pits and saving them in the freezer for this project. (You can also use the peels while dyeing, but I haven't been saving those.)
I'm using 6 pits, which is a number I chose more or less at random. Using more will produce a darker dye, using less will produce a paler dye. You also have to take into account how much material you're dyeing, as more material will spread the dye further and produce a lighter color. (I'm dyeing 200 gm of fingering weight yarn.) The amount of water is entirely unimportant, so long as you have enough to cover whatever you're going to dye.
Then you simmer the pits for a while. The amount of simmering time will also affect how dark your dye is. I simmered them for about three hours and the dye looked like this:
Then I let it sit overnight, because I also needed to soak the yarn. Whatever you're dyeing needs to be thoroughly wet, which might as well happen while you're sleeping.
In the morning, you bring the dye back to a simmer and add the yarn. If you don't have enough water to cover what you're dyeing, you can add some more at this point. And then you let that simmer for a while again. You don't want to let it boil, as that can cause your yarn to felt. (I'm using a superwash yarn, so I don't have to worry too much about that, but it's still a good precaution.)
I simmered mine for about an hour, at which point it had absorbed all the color in my dye bath, so I took it out and set it in the sink to drain and cool.
And now it is hanging to dry! It got pretty tangled in the dyeing process, so winding it is going to be a nightmare, but that is a problem for another day!
First! You get a bunch of avocado pits and put them in a big pot full of water. I don't eat avocados myself, but my parents are fans of guacamole, so I've been stealing their pits and saving them in the freezer for this project. (You can also use the peels while dyeing, but I haven't been saving those.)
I'm using 6 pits, which is a number I chose more or less at random. Using more will produce a darker dye, using less will produce a paler dye. You also have to take into account how much material you're dyeing, as more material will spread the dye further and produce a lighter color. (I'm dyeing 200 gm of fingering weight yarn.) The amount of water is entirely unimportant, so long as you have enough to cover whatever you're going to dye.
Then you simmer the pits for a while. The amount of simmering time will also affect how dark your dye is. I simmered them for about three hours and the dye looked like this:
Then I let it sit overnight, because I also needed to soak the yarn. Whatever you're dyeing needs to be thoroughly wet, which might as well happen while you're sleeping.
In the morning, you bring the dye back to a simmer and add the yarn. If you don't have enough water to cover what you're dyeing, you can add some more at this point. And then you let that simmer for a while again. You don't want to let it boil, as that can cause your yarn to felt. (I'm using a superwash yarn, so I don't have to worry too much about that, but it's still a good precaution.)
I simmered mine for about an hour, at which point it had absorbed all the color in my dye bath, so I took it out and set it in the sink to drain and cool.
And now it is hanging to dry! It got pretty tangled in the dyeing process, so winding it is going to be a nightmare, but that is a problem for another day!
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Date: 2020-04-02 06:05 am (UTC)