Review: Dyeing Yarn Naturally

As I was reading Dyeing Yarn Naturally by Ria Burns, I realized I’ve actually dyed more yarn in my career as a knitter than I generally think about. I’ve used Kool-Aid, Easter egg dye, tie dye and natural dye from a kit. I’ve also dyed yarn with dandelions from my yard and strawberries left in the fridge a bit too long.

Every time I read about dyeing I want to do more of it, and this book is definitely inspiring and approachable when it comes to dyeing techniques you can use with materials you can grow, forage or buy.

The book begins with the basic techniques of yarn preparation: making the yarn into a hank, scouring and mordanting. It explores general methods for using natural materials to dye with, either by putting the flowers, roots or other materials directly in the pot with the yarn, extracting the color and using that liquid to dye the yarn, as well as other techniques like solar dyeing, indigo preparations (which get their own chapter) and bundle dyeing.

Methods such as dip dyeing, tie dyeing and using additives to change the color in the yarn are also discussed.

Best of all, the book includes “recipes” or guidelines for using different common natural materials (only plants, not animal-based dyes), from onion skins and avocado stones to madder, coreopsis and marigold, ivy to walnuts. If you’re at all inclined to try natural dyeing you’ll probably be thinking, “oh, I can get that” as you read. (Example: we have black walnut trees in our yard and you can dye with the husks, which the squirrels are happy to leave lying around.)

There’s also information on growing and processing your own plants for dye making and tips on testing for light fastness, reusing dye liquid, dyeing finished objects and more.

Dyeing Yarn Naturally is a great general overview of the process of dyeing yarn with natural materials. The author is English, so the focus is on materials available there, but you can always scour your own yard and public spaces (if foraging is allowed) to find the dye plants that are local to you.

About the book: 96 pages, paperback, 25 plant profiles. Published 2023 by the Crowood Press. Suggested retail price $19.99.

Tutorial – Dying Yarn with Koolaid….

Try Something New: Dyeing Yarn with Natural Colors

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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