I’m ready to block pieces of my sweater. It is the fair isle sleeved sweater from Vogue Knitting, with the main body color in red and the contrasting colors in white, black, and gray. So I put one sleeve, the solid one, into the sink and wet it thoroughly. As I was squeezing some of the water out, I saw that it ran red. I rinsed again and again, and the red is bleeding just as strongly as the first time. I can’t seem to get it to stop bleeding.
The problem is, how can I do this with the fair isle sleeve? When it bleeds like this, will the red dye get on the white part of the sleeve and mess it up?
Uh-oh. That ain’t good. Should I even ask if you made a swatch and washed it before you started knitting? Lucky that you wet the solid sleeve first.
Make the swatch now, using all three colors (stripes will be fine – you don’t have to do any stranding). Wash it in cold water. If the red or the gray runs onto the white, you’ve made yourself a dry clean only sweater. Sew it up, take it to the best dry cleaner you can find (the kind that does the finishing by hand), and explain the problem. They can steam-block the sweater without damaging it.
I did make a swatch and but didn’t wash it. Though somewhere in the middle of making it I did wonder about it, so it wasn’t luck that I wet the solid sleeve first, but intentional. Guess I won’t be using this yarn for a fair isle sweater anymore. It’s Jaeger silk/merino blend in DK weight. Same thing for Karabella Aurora 8. So many “high quality” yarns still bleed, I see. I did do as you described before you replied to this post, though, with the swatch. The color does run into the white, though it washes out again right away. The problem is when I squeeze it to take out the water, thus pressing the red on the white, the dye is transferred again. I think it might be possible to steam block it at home (I have an iron with steam), I was just trying to avoid it as the finishing class I just took recommending not steam blocking silk and this is a silk blend.
I had this same problem with the Aurora 8 fair isle sweater, and bought something (was it RIT?) that takes transferred dyes out of white yarn. It works, but is kind of a pain. Still, at $1 a package, it’s a bit cheaper than the dry cleaner. But still annoying.
Knitasha. Great idea re dry cleaning and steam blocking.
When I washed the swatch I would try vinegar and salt in the water and just see. I believe colour will still run out somewhat but this is a usual technique to prevent ongoing bleeding…but it looks like Knitasha’s idea is THE one.
Shame. So lucky you did what you did with the sleeve.
Thanks, everyone, for the ideas (and condolences). No need to feel sorry anymore, though! :happydance: I’ve found a solution and this is how it goes. Hopefully this can help someone else who finds themself in the same predicament. I’m just copying and pasting what I wrote on another forum:
So, the problem was that, even if the knitting came out of the rinse with no red dye on the white, as soon as you handled it, dye that was still in the red yarn would transfer again to the white. I rinsed and carefully got rid of some of the excess water and laid it out to block and dry overnight. When I woke up, the red dye had seeped back up to the white and there was some pink around the edges. So this is how you do it: first, as someone said, the dye doesn’t set just from washing. That is, even as the red dye runs onto the white, it is not instantly set and will rinse off again. So, what you must do is rinse all the dye out of the item. This took me a verrry long time to do, but it must be done. Rinse and rinse and rinse and rinse until you see no more dye running and then rinse for a couple minutes more, all in cold water. Now, there is no more running running red dye to transfer to the white, yay!, and just like someone said, the red dye does not get set onto the white from the rinsing.
Since I had already had some of the red dye transferred over night and dry, I used the RIT Color Remover. So after all that rinsing, I put the sleeve in the bucket with the Color Remover and it got rid of the last bit of dye on the white. Now the sleeve is fine.
But it’s darned annoying that premium-priced yarn would have so much excess dye left in it. I mean, you would think that Jaeger and Karabella would rinse the yarn thoroughly after dying it, no?
Mwedzi, maybe you’d want to mention the problem to your yarn shop and ask them to pass it on to the manufacturer?
Thanks Ingrid and Knitasha. I promise to wash my swatches in the future. Yeah, it’s kind of annoying. It’s not like it was cheap yarn. It was expensive yarn with a good reputation. I still like Karabella Aurora 8, though, and will use it for solid color things (if it’s on sale). But in all honesty I was not very impressed by the Zephyr. It’s not springy at all, in fact, it’s so smushed that at many points it looked flat like a tape yarn or something. And it sometimes had these weird tufts that stick out on the knitting. Combine it with the amount it bled, really it was a ridiculous amount, and I’m not eager to use it again. Only one other yarn bled more and that was the cotton Peaches and Cream. I use it as a scrub cloth and that thing continues to bleed into probably its 20th use. :shock: I guess Jaeger does laceweight well, but they’ve got work to do on the DK.
