More Dying with RIT Black

 I did a dying experiment this week. I grabbed a skein of what was supposed to be a novelty ply (pigtail yarn...yeah not going to talk about that) and decided to go for it.

Novelty yarn, not Bella Wool

I had a plan to spin the rest of the Bella Wool and get a gradient effect from breaking dye, like when you would draw a sharpie line of a paper towel and put the tip in water at school. So step one would be spinning the yarn, step two would be knitting the hat/scarf/whatever, and step three would be dying, but I decided to sort of skip ahead to make sure my plan would work. It's a good thing I did.

 The only black dye I have is RIT, but I had seen all this stuff online about how people tried to dye with it and got purple instead, so I figured there was potential for breaking. Above is a shot of a few drops in the water. You can see the purple tint to it. But I wasn't sure if it would be enough dye, so I added more, apparently too much. By the time I put in the yarn (yes it was dry) you can see the solid black below.

 I only left it in a few minutes so I wouldn't over dye the wool, but again I was a bit off in my calculations, or maybe there was just way too much dye in the dye bath because this is what I got out.

Clearly, it's not broken, but by leaving it skeined I did get some interesting tonal variations. Those probably would have been greater if I had left it in the bath longer, but over all the effect isn't bad, just not what I was looking for. Oh well, at least I know that this isn't the way to break RIT.