Singing Crochet Chickadee

Step 2: Dying yarn

A Black-capped Chickadee's torso is grey on the back, rusty brown on the bottom and sides lightening to white below the neck.  I wanted a gradual change in colour so that it would look more natural but I didn't want to have to change colours every couple of stitches.  To that end I dyed a portion of the off-white coloured yarn with coffee. For this to work, you would need to use wool or cotton yarn, mine was cotton and it worked fine.

First what I did was to determine how much yarn I would need to dye, to do so I crocheted part of the body and then unravelled it to measure the length, it was ~8ft or 240cm.  I followed iamkeebler's intructable on how to dye yarn with coffee.  First soaking it for a half and hour in diluted vinegar, then brewing some really strong coffee and soaking the yarn in it. I wanted to produce a colour gradient in my yarn so I pulled a bit of the yarn out of the dye every couple of hours or so (I didn't wake up in the middle of the night to do this though). On the next day I rinsed the yarn gently with soap and water and hung it up to dry.