I've explained my normal dyeing process here before but, to recap: soak the yarn in water for about an hour, remove the yarn from the dyeing vessel, add a bit of food coloring and about 2T of vinegar, add the yarn back (no stirring), and microwave until the dye is exhausted.
Since I have a lot of yarn now that is useful as a sort of color card to show what the various food colors can do, I thought it would be fun to try a few more adventurous dye jobs.
The first thing I wanted to try was breaking black.I read a lot in the What a Kool Way to Dye group on Ravelry and I like to study their experiments at dyeyouryarn.com, but instead of studying how to break black, I decided to wing it. I know that it has to do with different pigments in the dye striking the yarn at different times, so I thought I would change my normal dyeing process to remove some of the elements that make the yarn take the dye more consistently. I was using McCormick's black. First, I did not soak the yarn first, assuming that this would help some parts of the yarn take the dye more quickly than other. Next, I used significantly more vinegar than usual (about 1/3 cup), assuming that colors that strike more quickly would go even more more quickly (if you know what I mean) if they had some extra vinegar to help them along. Finally, I used less water than usual, thinking that would make it more likely that the dye would be more concentrated in spots and might strike more quickly there.
