Dyeing yarn with black beans

This past week I finally dug out my Christmas present which was to cold dye yarn with black beans! It was a stressful (but slow) process that was a lot of fun. The instructions are here from the knit by a hen shop blog on the chance that you're interested in dyeing things with black beans. She goes through detailed steps, I'm just showing my play by play.

Step 1: Soak black beans for 24 hours. I thought I should aim for the darkest possible blue so that way if it ended up lighter, it wasn't a big deal. It was a 1:1.25 bean to water ratio which meant I needed a ton beans. I cooked them up afterwards, froze half of them, and we ate quite a few bean heavy meals all week.

Beans at the start of the soak. 

24 hours later. I was worried the beans had absorbed all the water.

 Step 2: Soak the yarn in water for a hour. 

I put another bowl on top to push them down. 

Step 3: Boil the yarn with aluminum potassium sulfate and cream of tarter for an hour. This is the process that makes the dye actually stick to the yarn. I figured out the quantities based on the ratios from the blog and how much the yarn weighed dry. To avoid felting the yarn, the blog mentioned it was important to heat the water up slowly. There were no details about "how slow is slow" so I was paranoid and took forever to heat up the water. That was probably unnecessary but I didn't ruin it so a win for me. 

Yarn being boiled.

Step 4: Strain off bean water (henceforth referred to as dye because that sounds better than 'bean water'). I strained it through a cheese cloth to make sure that there were no bean bits in the dye. Apparently bean bits can turn the yarn grey and that's not the look I was going for. 

Dye! The beans didn't soak it all up after all!

Step 5: Add yarn to dye. After the yarn cooled off for a bit, I rinsed off the alum and cream of tarter and then put each skein of yarn in a mason jar that I had poured half the dye into.They sat for 48 hours and I shook them up a few times to move the dye around.

Step 6: Rescue the yarn from the dye, wash it off with a bit of warm water, and see the result of your experiment! Clearly the yarn was twisted too tight in the mason jars for the dye to get through some parts which created a tie die effect rather than a consistent colour. But the blue turned out very blue and I think the different shades look great. I'm super happy with the end result. After having it dry outside for a few hours, it's currently on the drying rack to finish drying. Then I'll ball it up and the real challenge will be deciding what to knit with it!