Adventures in dyeing (aka what I did on my summer vacation.)

Tuesday, August 7, 2012 by Marianne 4 Comments

Towards the end of July, I headed off to lovely Cape Cod for my annual vacation with Katy and Yovani. As always we had tons of fun drinking beer*…

And visiting the beach…

Sometimes with beer 😉

We visited some lighthouses…

Saw an amazing storm…

And dyed some yarn with beets and blueberries (obviously.) Katy came to the Cape looking for some yarn to use to make a shawl as a gift. While we were at the Yarn Basket, Katy picked up some ready-to-be-dyed yarn and we discussed using Rit or Kool Aid to dye it. Somehow, from that discussion, we landed on beets as dye (obviously.) And after a stop at the farm stand, we were off!

Step 1: Simmer the heck out of some whole beets.

Step 2: Peel the beets and chop them into small pieces.

Step 3: Add some crushed blueberries (both for color and because the intended recipient loves blueberries) and simmer the peeled beet pieces and blueberries together. Turn off the stove, and leave the whole mix to soak while you go to the beach and to Provincetown, where there is a schooner in the library. Seriously, it’s awesome.

Step 4: Come home from P-Town too exhausted to even go to the drive-in (next year!) eat supper, drink some beer, and discuss whether beet yarn follow-through would actually happen.

Step 5: Drink more beer, go with yes. Strain the beets an blueberries, reserving the beet/blueberry juice.

Step 6: Gently simmer the un-dyed yarn in a mixture of three parts water to one part vinegar for 30 minutes. At the same time bring the beet/blueberry juice to a gentle simmer with a cup of vinegar. We used both white vinegar and red vinegar because that’s what we had and because we decided that using red wine vinegar wouldn’t hurt anything because beets are red. Vacation logic at work!

Step 7: Remove the simmered yarn and tie some beet slices to it to achieve a variegated effect.

Step 8: Gently simmer the yarn in the beet/blueberry juice for an hour. Drink more beer.

Step 9: Strain the yarn, remove the beets, simmer the yarn for a 30 minutes in salt water to set the dye, hang it to dry outside, go to bed because it’s after midnight (also, beer) and hope for the best.

Step 10: Wake up the next morning, and marvel at the fact that it worked!

The yarn came out a mixture or rusts, purples, yellows, and oranges which was exactly what Katy wanted. She’s going to make a riff on Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Pi Shawl with it, and she’ll have quite a story to share with the recipient when she’s finsihed.

We finished out our stay in Wellfleet with some (duh) Wellfleet oysters…