How I dyed yarn with coffee - now with pictures!
I love yarn, and I love love love coffee, so combining the two sounded like a great idea. Which it was. It was a lot of fun, and I’m happy with the results. However, a word of warning: dyeing yarn with coffee is messy, and it takes long, especially if you’re working with yarn that felts easily. But it’s worth the time and effort, if you ask me. I used this tutorial (from The AntiCraft) as a general guideline, and I consulted several other tutorials (you can find lots of good tutorials by googling “how to dye yarn with coffee”).
I started with a hank of 100% Finnsheep wool. The yarn is worsted weight, and there’s about 100 grams in the hank. The brand ‘Aholaidan tila’ was new to me, so I did some googling, and was pleasantly surprised to find out the yarn comes from an organic sheep farm, located only 40 kilometers from where I live.
To prepare the yarn for the dye bath, I washed it gently with wool wash and rinsed. Then I mixed 8 parts water and 1 part white vinegar in a bucket, and let the yarn soak in there for a couple of hours.
According to several tutorials, used coffee grounds work well in dyeing, but last summer while rummaging through the pantry at our summer cabin, I’d found an old, unopened pack of coffee that was way past its ‘best before’ date (it was in 2010), so I used that. I poured the grounds into boiling water, and let it simmer with the lid on for 30 minutes. Then I poured the contents of the pot into a bowl through a sieve lined with a kitchen towel, to get rid of the coffee grounds. I poured the coffee mixture back into the pot and added cold water until it was lukewarm. I also mixed in one deciliter of white vinegar.
It’s important to avoid rapid changes in temperature, when you work with animal fibers, especially if they’re not superwash treated. This is because wool felts easily. For this same reason, you should also take care to handle the yarn gently.
I squeezed the excess water/vinegar mixture off the yarn (gently, very gently), and placed the yarn in the pot. Then I slowly brought the liquid to a simmer, and let the yarn soak in the bath for an hour. I tried to keep the temperature constant, but at one point it got a bit too hot (I was just turning the heel in the sock I was knitting, and not paying enough attention to the pot), and the yarn felted a little in one place. Not too much, though, it’s still perfectly useable.
I took the pot off the hot plate, and put it aside to allow the yarn to cool slowly. And it was slow. Hours. Then I rinsed the yarn, wrapped it in a towel and gently squeezed the water our, and hung it to dry. It took about two days to dry completely.
The color is lighter than I expected. It’s a light golden brown, very beautiful and warm. It still has a faint scent of coffee to it. I’m thinking of making a hat or a pair of mittens with the yarn. All in all, I enjoyed the dye experiment a lot, and I will dye with coffee again.
