Nicole Frost

Posted on: SuperwashMarch 4, 2025

Deep Winter Colorway on Nieve, Extra Fine Merino Wool

Featuring: Knomad Nieve (75% Extra Fine Superwash Merino Wool 19.5 mic 25% Recycled Nylon.)

Our Goal: Create a semi solid tonal yarn with a coordinating speckle. Bonus content: what is dye migration and how do we handle it?

Abstract: Today, we’re creating a rich, moody, complex deep winter colorway and strategically placing the dye. We can utilize white space for our coordinating speckles to not be drowned out by the darker background color. Bonus content: my favorite dark teal color, Spruce from Jacquard, has migrated in undertone, saturation point and density. What do we do when dye manufacturers reformulate a color?

For those with time to read the finer details, let’s dive in!

YOU WILL NEED:

• 4 skeins of Nieve
• Respirator
• Double burner induction cooktop
• Acid reactive dyes in Spruce from Jacquard, Bright aqua from Dharma, Mochachino and Evergreen from ProChem
• 4” Deep stainless steel restaurant tray
• Citric acid (fixative for dye to adhere to wool)
• Gram scale
• ML measuring cup
• Synthrapol Textile Detergent

To Start: Today, we’re utilizing a technique I developed for “single process” skeins where I wanted both the kettle dyed effect, and the speckled effect, but didn’t want to have to heat set and process the yarn in two separate passes. For a full length youtube tutorial, see this video.

The goal is to develop a deep winter colorway, something vibrant but also dark and moody. I decided on using Jacquard Spruce as a background color, as it can look teal green or black depending on the light. It also plays well with most coordinating speckle colors without browning or neutralizing them. My foreground or “pop” colors will be Bright Aqua, Evergreen and Mochachino.

START WITH SOAKING YOUR YARN OVERNIGHT IN WARM WATER AND 1 TSP SYNTHRAPOL

Typically, when doing a colorway where the background is so dark, it’s difficult to speckle in less saturated colors because they get swallowed into the dark color and disappear. To prevent this, we’re starting with a super low water table to control the spread of the dye. Since this is a superwash/nylon base, it’ll “drink up” close to 80% of the dye on contact before even being heat set. For non superwash bases, you’ll want to apply heat (no sizzling though!) until the dye is mostly absorbed before moving onto step 2.

4 GRAMS OF SPRUCE DISSOLVE IN 1300 ML WATER

Dissolve 4 grams of Spruce in 1300 ML of water. Where do those 2 ratios come from?

We have 400 grams Nieve x 2% d.o.s. = 8 grams of dye

Since we only want half of the skeins dyed (the back half we lay in the pan) we cut that number in half to 4 grams of dye. The proportion of water is based on how many skeins are in the pan. It’s roughly 300 ML per skein, and we have 4 skeins. That’s the right amount of water to allow the dye to absorb on the back half of the skein while leaving intentional white space along the top for speckling like so:

I set my induction to 200 degrees and within about 5 minutes, the water is mostly clear and the top of the skeins are hot enough to receive the speckles. Why do we want to speckle on hot vs cold yarn?

Doing this whole process in one pass increases the amount of over blending, browning and neutralization of colors. The dye isn’t fully absorbed until the yarn is hot and acidic. By waiting in between stages, we have more control on the vibrancy and spread of the foreground speckle colors we’ll be adding to our planned white space.

I add another 1000 ml of water and speckle in the mochachino, evergreen and bright aqua across the white space. The amount of dye to add is approximately 30% the amount you ultimately want. Meaning leave space and time after your first pass of speckles for the dye to “spread” before adding more. I ultimately used about a quarter gram of speckle color.

Most new dyers will absolutely snow their yarn with the amount of speckles they want on the finished skein, and then watch in horror as the dye starts to spread and the speckles disappear and just become a highly mottled semi solid color. So speckle lightly and give them time to grow and absorb before assessing if you want more.

I’m not a big fan of white space on dark yarns, so when I dip a clear spoon in and and the speckles are fixed/water is clear, I will flip the skeins over and spread out any white patches and speckle on those too. If you like the high contrast appearance of white patches hidden within the skein, this step is unnecessary. I wear thick rubber gloves so I can manipulate the yarn while hot.

Once cool to room temperature, rinse and spin out the excess water and let dry in the sun!

And here we have a richly saturated, lightly speckled deep winter colorway. But wait, there’s more! The color Spruce was reformulated and looks completely different from my sample color, and I want to address that here because it’s a common occurrence with dye companies to be reformulating dyes and us end users to have to scramble to match a dye lot or make a colorway work with the new version of the color. So here’s the 2 batches of Spruce side by side for you to compare:

Same amount by weight, but not by volume, which tells us the density is different.

The dye powder colors are completely different, and sprayed onto a wet paper towel, we can see a different undertone and opacity.

To adjust for that, I changed the saturation point from 1.5% of my sample to 2% hoping that the yellow cast wouldn’t be as visible and to “hide” the undertone difference with the higher saturation point. I also chose Evergreen as a speckle color to overthrow that unwanted blue color and keep the palette cohesive in the forest green color family.

Something else interesting about the new formulation vs the old is the new formulation has a prominent mid tone blue “bleed” or “halo” that the previous version didn’t. This presents problems for professional dyers who carry the same colorways over years because they won’t even be close to matching dye lots and oftentimes, colorways have to be discontinued because a suitable substitute or workaround just can’t be found.

Thank you, as always, for coming along on a dye journey with me. Til next time,

Nic Frost