I’ve had some black food dye for ages but hadn’t tried using it yet. Today I had a sudden enthusiasm to do so. The black dye is made up of three different colours, and I’d heard the black dyes have a tendency to split, so I was unlikely to get an even effect.
I first overdyed these merino leggings from plain cream. I just wanted them darker so I felt less like I was wearing clown pants.
I’m pretty happy with these. I did deliberately twist the legs of the orange pair to get a bit of striping. The dye variation on the blue/green pair is quite random, I just shoved those in the pot foot end first.
Then I overdyed the cream skirt I made last winter, because I wasn’t wearing it, and for fun. This so didn’t come out the way I thought! I wanted black at the top, grading to whatever at the hem. Well, I at least managed some whatever 🙂
It is interesting but I’m not sure yet whether I like it. I tried to get a blacker colour at the waist with extra dye, but it just went a slightly darker purple. I quite like the mottly green at the hem though.
Because I’d added more dye that wasn’t working for the skirt, I had some to use up. The red tones are taken up first, then green is left. So I had a pot of mostly green dye. I popped in four balls of a wool yarn I’d liked when I purchased it, but now think is a bit dull. Original colour shown bottom right. I love how these have come out. You can tell what order I put them in the pot eh? Yes I should have skeined them first but oh well, I didn’t. Each ball will have a casual gradient of overdye. I’ll let them dry a bit before skeining them so they can finish drying. Later. And no I don’t yet know what I’ll make with this.
Montjoye Makkinstuff 