Working with Hand-Dyed Yarn

The Craft / Working with Hand-Dyed Yarn

Hand-dyed yarn is not simply prettier commercial yarn. It behaves differently, requires a different approach to project planning, and will occasionally surprise you even when you think you've accounted for everything. Most of what trips up knitters working with hand-dyed for the first time is not a flaw in the yarn; it's a mismatch between expectations formed by commercial yarn and the actual nature of a fiber that was dyed by hand in small batches.

The surprises are, for the most part, good ones. Learning to work with hand-dyed is mostly learning to see what the yarn wants to do, and then deciding whether to follow it or to redirect it.

Skeins vs. Dye Lots

Commercial yarn is dyed in large industrial batches engineered for consistency. If you run out of a color mid-project and need to order more, you match the dye lot number and the yarn will match. Hand-dyed yarn doesn't have dye lots in the same sense. It has batches: limited productions of a specific colorway that can vary from one session to the next.

The variation between batches is usually subtle. The color recipe is the same, but the specific skein arrangement in the dye pot, the exact temperature and timing, the slight variation in how deeply the fiber absorbed on a given day, all of these produce small differences that you may or may not notice depending on how closely the skeins are compared.

Buy enough in one order. For a garment or large project, this is the most important rule. Look at the pattern yardage, add 10-15%, and buy it all at once. If you need to supplement later, you may find that the new batch reads slightly differently. For some projects and colorways, this is not noticeable; for others, it is. It's easier to avoid the situation than to diagnose it mid-project.

Alternating Skeins

Even within a single order, two skeins of the same hand-dyed colorway will not be identical. The color placement will differ; the saturation may vary slightly; one might have a deeper purple section where the other has more blue. If you're working a large project that requires more than one skein, you almost always want to alternate skeins.

Alternating is simple: work two rows or rounds from skein A, then two from skein B, without cutting the yarn. You leave both skeins loosely attached and carry the unused yarn up the side, catching it every two rows or so to keep it from forming a long float. This blends any slight variation between skeins gradually and evenly across the fabric, so that instead of a visible line where you switched skeins you get a gradient that's barely perceptible.

If you're working in the round, alternate every round instead of every two rows, or work two rounds from A and two from B, catching the carried yarn under the working yarn at the round start.

Understanding Pooling

Pooling happens when a color repeat in a variegated yarn aligns with itself across rows, concentrating the same color in the same position stitch after stitch and creating an unintended pattern. At its most dramatic, this produces distinct pools or blotches of a single color in an otherwise variegated fabric. It can also produce diagonal striping or a peculiar visual texture that seems at odds with the skein.

Whether pooling is a problem depends entirely on the effect. Intentional pooling, working with a colorway and stitch count specifically to align the repeat, is a technique in its own right and produces striking results. Unintentional pooling, where you wanted a random speckle and got blotches, is more frustrating.

How to address pooling:

Changing needle size changes the stitch width, which changes how the color repeat lands relative to each stitch. A smaller needle means more stitches per row, which means the repeat lands differently. This is sometimes enough to break up an unwanted pool.

Adding or removing stitches has the same effect as changing needle size in terms of how the repeat aligns.

Working in a broken pattern stitch, such as seed stitch or ribbing, disrupts alignment because the stitches don't stack directly on top of each other the way stockinette does.

Using a gradient-friendly pattern, one that includes direction changes, short rows, or color breaks, gives the yarn permission to do something interesting rather than fighting it.

Reading Color in Light

Yarn in a skein and yarn knitted up can look quite different, and yarn in bright shop lighting, in the photographs on a product page, and in the corner of your living room are often three different colors. This is not a failure of photography (well, it sometimes is); it's the nature of dye interacting with light in different spectra.

Color-critical decisions, like whether two colorways work together, whether a skein matches your remaining yarn, or whether a color reads the way you want it to in a finished object, are best made in multiple light conditions. Natural daylight is the standard. Incandescent light shifts reds and oranges warmer. Fluorescent and LED light can push colors blue or green. If you're on the fence about a colorway, hold it near a window.

Hand-dyed yarn has more complexity than commercial yarn precisely because it was produced at small scale; that complexity catches light differently as the fiber moves. The same skein can appear to change color as it shifts in your hands. This is part of its appeal. It is also why you should look at it in good light before committing to a specific pairing.

Dye Lot Variation and Surprises

Hand-dyed yarn occasionally does things that weren't anticipated. A color will migrate across a dye barrier during the steaming process and produce a soft transition where there should have been a clear break. Two colors will blend in the bath and produce a third where they overlap. The fiber will absorb unevenly in one section of a skein, creating a lighter patch. These are not defects; they are the record of what actually happened in the dye pot.

If you receive a skein that has an unexpected feature, hold it up and consider it before deciding it's a problem. Most dye variations that seem alarming on the skein disappear or integrate into the knitted fabric. A section of unexpectedly deep color becomes a shadow. A lighter area becomes a highlight. The fabric is more forgiving than the skein, because the skein compresses everything and the knitting spreads it.

Blocking Hand-Dyed Yarn

Hand-dyed yarn, especially on a non-superwash base, can bleed in the first wash. This is most common with deep, saturated colors: dark reds, deep purples, black. The dye is exhausted during dyeing, meaning all available dye molecules have bonded to the fiber, but a small amount of unbound dye remains and will wash out in the first one or two washes.

Wash your finished object with cool water and a small amount of wool wash before you block it. If the water runs tinted, drain and repeat until it runs clear. This is normal and doesn't indicate that the dye is poorly fixed; it's the last of the surface dye washing off. After this initial wash, the color should be stable.

For full blocking guidance, including wet blocking versus steam and tools worth having, see Blocking & Finishing. For guidance on how different fibers respond to washing and blocking, see Fiber & Its Properties.

Continue reading: Blocking & Finishing · The Dye Pot · Weight & Measure