Dyeing is madly fun and interesting, but sometimes you don’t get the thing you want. Even testing your dye mixes, you can never be perfectly certain that a new colour is going to come out the way you think it will, especially after it dries. Fortunately, this is fairly straightforward to repair!
Provided you haven’t dyed your yarn too dark a shade, you can always overdye, using precisely the same process as for regular dyeing, which we explained here in some detail, though remember that this yarn already contains dye and you don’t want to overload it so don’t put too much dye powder into the new mix.
It’s not the same as dyeing from white or undyed yarn. The new colour will not swamp the old one completely. Instead, they’re going to mix and they’re going to mix differently from the way that two dyes of that shade would mix. For example, orange and pink dye mixed together will get you red in CYMK dyes. But if you take a pale or blotchy orange and layer a pink dye over it, you get a pretty coral like this one:
Here are some of our overdyes, you can see the range of techniques involved:
The most basic is dyeing in much the same colour to even out tone. This blue had some spots that were less saturated with the dye and overall, the look was somewhat uneven. We made up an overdye mix that was a fairly similar shade of blue and overdyed with that. As you can see, this does not create a perfectly uniform colour, but because the blues are very similar, it creates a very subtle tonal effect, and not a variegated one.
The green much more clearly has some spots that are nearly bare where the dye clearly didn’t reach properly. It also came out a sickly colour: not quite enough black to make it a proper olive, too much blue to make it a striking spring green, but not enough to make it not look a bit unwell. We added an overdye in green, but a much bluer green, and you can see how it took hold more readily in the parts that were already pale making those parts into a nice shade of teal, but coming across much greener in the parts that were already firmly dyed. The end result is variegated, not uniform, but because it’s all in tonal shades, it should knit up into a green with some lovely depth.
Still lots of variation, but a colour I like better.
This one looked yellow-orange in the original dye bath, but faded to brown (the picture is redder than the reality) when it dried. We put a layer of bright orange, a very different colour than the original, overtop and it changed to this coppery orange tonal with some copper or even bronze areas and some more orange and yellow spots. It’s still a somewhat muted shade, but it would make a pretty cheerful pair of socks.
I’m so glad this one turned out because the brown was not a good shade at all.
The very pink purple was the most dramatic: we dipped it in blue dye and got this strikingly variegated skein that goes all the way from almost pink to purple that’s practically blue. The colours still go together because they’re all just different proportions of the same two dyes, but it’ll make for a much more varied pair of socks or a shawl like a paler, brighter version of Aria’s Hitchhiker with its near-stripes and pretty colour changes.
Sadly lacking its before picture, but you can see the colour in the image at the top of the post.
A truly easy fix, especially as you don’t need to wait for the yarn to fully dry before you overdye it so you can fix it in the same dye session. I love overdyeing!
As usual, this is a lot more yarn than we can knit quickly, so we’ve popped a lot of it up onto our Etsy store, if you’re interested in acquiring any of it!
Overdyeing! was originally published on Wrap Around Purl
