I spoke with a lady on
Ravelry a few days ago, she made a gorgeous sweater and when it was washed, picked up a bit of color from another item. She was very upset, and I don't blame her since she put so much work into the sweater.
This is the sweater, with bits of renegade dye splotches:
I offered to dye it for her at no charge, since I have the studio space, the dye pots and the dyes. It's now on it's way to me here in the States, and I wanted to journal the process of bringing her sweater to new life.
Her sweater is knit from undyed Blue faced Leicester, and after discussing color options decided on a Peacock Blue. I'll be using a custom blend of acid reactive dye to get this color, which is dyed here on Merino yarn in a colorway my son requested for a scarf.
I think it will be beautiful. So now it's just a matter of waiting for the sweater from the UK.
Once the sweater arrives to me, it will spend a day soaking in cool water to help the wool fully accept the dye. Then it will be dyed, and then blocked and air dried, and shipped back to her in the UK.
I love custom work, and I really am so happy that I can help her and her beautiful sweater is not a loss.
Update 2/4/11
The other day, the sweater arrived! I opened the package and immediately was taken aback by the beautiful handwork that Misty put into this sweater. It was gorgeous!
Spotty, but beautiful. I immediately messaged Misty and told her the sweater had arrived and safely in my hands.
I photographed the sweater so that I had a landmark of where the dye patches were, and weighed the sweater to calculate the dye solution to get the percentage of dye I needed to bring that sweater to a 2% dos, or depth of saturation.
The sweater is soaking in a bath of cool water, and will for the next 5 hours (24 in total) to get that wool completely saturated.
This is the sweater, and the spots:
Update February 9, 2011
I have some updated pictures and a challenge facing me and the Traveling Sweater Of Doom over the next two days.
I soaked Misty’s sweater in a cool water bath for 24 hours to let the BFL soak up water. This is the first step to the dye prep. The worst thing you can do to fiber is not presoak it prior to trying to dye a uniform color. If I was doing a variegated dye it would be ok, because you want white areas, but in a uniform dye you don’t. So into the bath it went.
As you can see there are darker areas after a few hours soaking. The sleeve of the sweater is showing this, and these areas are what I was concerned with when I saw the sweater. These are areas where the dye from the other article Misty washed it with, affected the wools. You can barely see it with the naked eye where she did a good job removing most of the original blue dyes. You can see them better on her camera picture here:
The problem with these areas is they can block or affect dyes. Sometimes you can add a presoak to an unfinished garment before dying but I didn’t want to add any presoak prior to my dyeing because I wasn’t sure what the offending blue dyes were that were in Misty’s sweater when in came to me. Presoaking can make it worse. Chemical on chemical is not good. Just like human hair you don’t want to dye over certain dyes because they can cause color differences. Cool plain water was the my deal presoak choice.
In the water bath (you can see the affected areas from whatever that original dye was on the sleeve, those areas appear darker when wet)
So I mixed the dye stock, (it was actually darker than it photographed because I wanted to go a shade darker than planned to get those pre-dyed areas to match as closely as I could overall).
The dye stock, a custom color for Misty of a teal peacock blue you can see the dyes actual color in the pot below:
Then I removed the now wet sweater, added the dye to the pot, stirred and added the sweater back in, and processed it. See how nice the dye sucked up into the BFL?
Now here is the dilemma, once it has been processed and dyed, those predyed areas in the original yarn are taking the dye in a darker saturation. Not pretty. But I believe I can fix this.
These are the dyed dried areas, as you can see the original dye problem areas are still there. In real life ( my photography skills are not the best :/ ) these areas are not as clearly noticeable as in the pictures.
I want to now handpaint this sweater to blend these areas. I’m thinking of transitional colors, a midnight blue to match the darker spots, transitioning to a next shade to the original peacock in the sweater. It will not be a solid dye but softly variegated. I’m waiting for Misty’s input before I proceed. She may say “leave it as is” or she may say “have at it”. I think if I left it as is, it would be ok, because in real life, it’s not as starkly different as my pictures. But I think I can make it even better.
