Welcome to Part 1 of my YarnBox Journey series! If you haven’t read the intro, you should probably do so before reading on. It’ll tell you what you’re looking at! Now let’s get going…

Before we ever touched a bottle of dye or a measuring spoon, we had to prep the yarn. The night before a dye day, we pulled out the bags of yarn we’d need. Each bag contains a kilo of yarn — ten 100g skeins. We would lay them out on my bed and take the yarn out of the bags.

Then we would cut lengths of cotton yarn, which doesn’t absorb the dye and so stays white, and tie the skeins together in groups of three, which equals one dye lot. Yes, it took longer to prep the yarn, but it made it SO much easier to pull them out of the dye pots later on! Tangles practically vanished, which sped up the rest of the process dramatically.

Once the next day’s batch was all tied up, we would put containers in the bathtub and fill them with warm water. Then we would lower the yarn into the containers and squeeze the air out so that the warm water completely soaked the yarn.

By then we were tired and ready for bed, so we’d close the shower curtain in an effort to cut down on the wet wool smell (it didn’t work) and leave the yarn over night. This made the fiber open up so that it was ready to receive dye the next day.

Come back tomorrow for the next part of the series: Dye Kitchen.