Dash of Turmeric

I've been thinking about dying yarn. A while back I bought two skeins of Undyed Superwash Merino from Elann and they had been sitting there waiting to be bathed. I thought I can start with edibles rather than chemical dyes. This morning I went to Safeway and bought some pomegranates and some tumeric.

Undyed yarn

The pomegranates looked absolutely gorgeus, the seeds, the intense color juice. I cooked them with water and soaked a skein yarn into it, then added some white vinegar. It came out rather boring with the color was very light. I decided to be a bit adventurous and added a dash of tuemric. Immediately it soaked up the yellow and the yarn turned out to be a rather buttery yellow. I think even without the pomegranates, the yarn would've looked like that with little tumeric.

Pomegranate Soup


Kind of non-descript color

The one started with pomegrante then added in turmeric. It really took the yellow of tumeric.

The second skein was cooked with a lot more turmeric and some vinegar. And it came out with a very intense golden yellow.

the intense yellow with pure turmeric.

The part I liked the least was rinsing them. It took a long, long, long time to rinse the pure turmeric one until very little color run in the water.

Overall, it was fun. My skeins got tangled up a bit. But I was able to sort them out and wind up in cakes.

Drying


All wound up in cakes

This can be addictive. I'm thinking of getting more yarn and some dye for more colorfast dye job.

As far as knitting goes, I've begun working with my fairisle design using Elann Limited Edition Tremelo. I made the motif again with Excel. I got about 8" knitted in round. The yarn is a slightly splitty, but very soft to work with. The color combo is interesting to me. I picked the color simply based on the limited color selection the yarn has when it came on sale last month. Paul thinks the pattern with the colors is too busy, but I like it that way. I like the light red, to me it's a bit retro. And I like a little craziness sometimes.
Right now I'm still having a hard time picturing how it will look finished. Perhaps it may be a bit garrish, but heck why not? I can do garrish.