Is Silk Dyeable?

How-to Questions
1

I just got some beautiful white silk yarn. I wonder can you dye it? though i’m a bit cautious because I have never dyed yarn before. what is the process? and is it hard?

2

The short answer is "yes."
The longer suggestion is to Google “How to dye silk yarn.”

3

You can dye silk, I believe you use acid dyes, like you would for wool. If you google “dyeing silk yarn”, you can get some more info and experiences people had with it.

4

yes, good info here: http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/aboutdyes.shtml

5

Its seems doable. While I’m a very confident knitter because knitting mistakes are always fixable. I’m actually quite nervous about dyeing. But it almost seems like the photography process which I have done successfully. I really like the yarn so I really hope i don’t ruin it. has anyone used the knitpicks acid dyes?

6

I’ve dyed lots of silk, using Procion MX dyes - I can’t use wool, so dye silk and cotton instead. Here’s some silver yarn I dyed to green and blue using these dyes :

I haven’t tried using acid dyes because I can’t use them for anything else. Hope this helps!
Fi xxx

7

WOW that came out BEAUTIFUL!!! where did you buy that dye? and and was it the same process as the acid dye? How did you ensure that you kept the sheen?

8

Thank you :slight_smile: I bought the dyes off ebay - you also need urea and soda ash as fixatives, but there’s plenty of craft shops online that sell them. The process, for me, is this :

Wash yarn to remove any grease or coatings, and dry.

Mix dyes by mixing urea, water, and dye powder. These can then be kept indefinitely in the fridge (so far I’ve kept them for a few months and they still work).

Soak yarn in soda ash/water mixture for an hour to let the fixative soak in. Take out yarn and squeeze water out, put on tray and smoosh dyes into yarn. Wrap in clingfilm overnight, then rinse out in hot water, then cold water twice.

The sheen was due to the base silk - but the washing
really opened up the fiber - I tried to agitate it as little as I could to rinse it, but I really put it through its paces when I washed it before. It seemed to have had a coating on to cover up the ‘silk smell’, which came off and really made it shine. The dye doesn’t screw the shine, if not it makes it brighter. But you have to get the right silk for it :wink:

Fi xxx