When knitting with hand-dyed yarns, here’s a couple of tips for what to expect and to improve your experience:

To be safe, we recommend rinsing your yarn with cold water before starting a project! Especially when working with highly saturated colours or speckles (and combinations thereof), taking the time to rinse your yarn will prevent bleeding related accidents in a future wash.

Every skein is thoroughly washed after the dyeing process, however it isn’t possible to entirely prevent tiny dye crystals from occasionally hanging on and thwarting our efforts. We wash our skeins until the water runs clear, each colourway is treated individually. Despite this, it can still happen that excess dye in highly saturated skeins will hang onto the fibers and come loose over time.

To ensure your knitted garments stay beautiful and soft as long as possible, to clean your finished projects, we recommend hand washing using cold water and a mild detergent. Air dry laying the garments on a flat surface.

Store your finished garments (particularly seasonal and delicate knits) in a dry and ideally sealed place, to minimize the chances of unwelcome guests dining on your fibres. Keep out of direct sunlight for extended periods of time. All dyes used by Nocturne are light and sun fast, but we still recommend this to prevent any potential of discoloration.

Batch Consistency

There are a few perks and particularities that come with knitting with hand-dyed yarn, and which are handy to keep in mind:

As the name suggests, at Nocturne we dye our yarn by hand and in sustainably small quantities. While we use recipes to stay as consistent as possible, we recommend that you buy colours coming from the same dye lot for your project, and alternate skeins for a seamless finish.

This applies especially for semi-solid colourways; we strive to make all our colours even, but inevitably, some variation in saturation within a skein can happen. If this is an effect you don’t prefer, for a guaranteed 100% solid colour we recommend looking among the commercially dyed brands.

If you need more skeins than are available at a time, it’s possible to custom order with us as well.