Yes. All of them, a little, the first time.

Acid dyes form a strong bond with protein fibres and nylon, but a hand dyed skein holds some excess dye that only lets go in water. Expect a tint in the water on the first wash. That is normal, and should not affect the overall colour of the yarn, it is only a small amount of dye that was never completely attached to begin with. For most colourways the water should run clear by the second or third wash.

And: Some colourways will bleed a little, forever.

These are the ones built on fluorescent (UV reactive) pink and yellow.

These dyes have very small molecules and carry a high number of water soluble groups, which is part of what makes them so bright, and exactly why they never fully commit to the fibre. This is not a hand dyeing problem that mills have solved, either.

Fluorescent acid dyes have poor wash fastness as a class. Industrial dye houses manage it with aftertreatments and exhaustive wash-off cycles we cannot run in a studio our size, and even then it is management rather than a solution.

We use them in a limited number of colourways, with the techniques that fix them as well as they can be fixed, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: they will leach a little with every wash for the life of the piece.

They are also wonderful, and used carefully they are a large part of why hand dyed yarn looks the way it does. 

If you're worried about knitting a fluo colour (or any saturated colour) next to a pale one, knit a small swatch with both, wash it, and see what happens before you commit. 

Firstly, hand wash your hand dyed yarn. Yes, we recommend this even for superwash. The superwash treatment stops the wool felting. It does nothing to stop colour running or fading.

What we are trying to do is clean the item, condition the fibre, and prevent redeposition. Redeposition is what we call it when dye that has come off the yarn into the wash water settles back onto another part of the fabric and stains it. Here's how to avoid it.

• Use a generous basin or bath.

More water means less dye per litre if any comes off the yarn.

• Use cool water, and don't leave the garment to soak for more than half an hour. 

Water is a solvent, a fact that gets forgotten sometimes, and warm water dissolves loose dye faster and moves it around more. 

• Use a small squeeze of a low pH, enzyme-free detergent or wool wash.

You know what we recommend? Shampoo. Ordinary, plain, clear shampoo. Shampoo is formulated for exactly this kind of fibre! It's cheap, it holds loose dye suspended in the water instead of letting it land back on the fabric, and carries away oils and grime while it does it.

• 🌈Put a colour catcher in the bath✨

for any colour you're worried about! They work a treat.

• Never leave a wet piece folded or bundled.

This goes for in the bath as much as out of it. Lay it flat to dry so no damp section is sitting against another.

• A splash of white vinegar in the final rinse.

Contrary to popular belief, this will not fix bleeding dye. What it will do is improve the shine and softness of protein fibres.

• If your item is knit with a wooly non-superwash

maybe try adding in a little lanolin to your rinse every two to three washes. It helps maintain the water-proofing and stain resistant qualities of untreated wool and keeps the garment supple. This is called 'refatting' and there're many rinses like this on the market. 

Wash the whole piece only when it needs it.

Every full wash is another opportunity for dye to move around, so for one small mark, treat the mark.The general method:

• dampen the spot and use a little gentle shampoo. Work from the outside of the stain inwards, so you do not spread it.
• Blot, never rub. Rubbing felts wool and abrades the surface, which shows up afterwards as a shiny or fuzzy patch.
• Lay a folded towel underneath the area so the stain has somewhere to go, and change it as it picks up.
• Use as little liquid as you can. A soaked patch will dry with a tide line.
• When you have finished, blot the area with a clean damp cloth to remove the cleaning residue, then lay flat to dry.

Airing out

For most of the history of dress, people wore shifts, undershirts and slips between their skin and their outer clothes. Laundering damages cloth, and skin oils and sweat make laundering necessary, so the layer that touched the body was made of something that could take heavy and frequent washing. Undyed linen is the obvious example. The outer clothes were washed far less often.

Take a note from the past. Keep your knits off your skin where you can, and between wears, leave the piece to air rather than reaching for the soap.

Airing works best with moving air, not just time in a wardrobe. Hang or lay the piece somewhere with a bit of circulation for a day, and it will come back fresh. Wool holds moisture inside the fibre rather than on the surface, which gives odour causing bacteria much less to work with, so most of what a day's wear leaves behind simply goes away on its own.

Done this way, you can usually get through most of a cold season on a big hand knit without a full wash.

Heavy sweat and smoke are the exceptions and will need washing.

This is called crocking. It is dry dye transfer, and it happens when a small amount of dye is sitting on the surface of the fibre rather than bonded inside it. You will see it most with our deeper, saturated colours:

• Colourways which use deep black/blue 'grunge washes' like Nox or Somnum. 
• Colourways with extreme saturations like Red Panda or Bryophyta
• Colourways that use quite a lot of red dye, such as Hinageishi ひなげし, or Ares
• And colourways with speckles (which are dye applied at very high concentration on purpose) 

It is not a fault, and it does not mean the colour will wash out. It means the skein has a little extra dye sitting on top that has not gone anywhere yet.

It can look alarming while you work. Bear in mind what you are actually doing: dragging hundreds of metres of wool across one or two spots on your fingers to tension it. Those spots generate friction and heat, and that's what knocks unbonded dye off the strand. Concentrate a whole skein's worth of surface dye onto two square centimetres of finger and it looks like someone's painted a stripe on your hand.

It will stop after you wash the finished piece, as described above.

If you're worried it might happen, then take the time to wash the skein before you wind it.

Keep it in the skein, use cool water and shampoo as described above, give it a few gentle swishes, then let it dry completely before winding.

Crocking dye transfers to skin and tools much more readily than to the yarn beside it.

But if you are knitting something like Nox with Lux and you want to be certain, knit a small swatch with both, wash it, and see.

Ten minutes of swatching to answer your question is a cheaper spend than the time you invest knitting that jumper or shawl. 

Sunlight is the enemy! Acid dyes are reasonably lightfast, but no textile dye survives a summer on a sunny windowsill or the back window of a car.

Some colour families are more sensitive than others: turquoises, some bright pinks and fuchsias, and some yellows will shift faster in strong light than blues, browns and greys.

Fluorescent dyes will fade faster than any of the others as they work by absorbing high-energy invisible light (like UV or blue light) and re-emitting it as visible light. This constant cycle of absorbing and releasing energy makes their molecules very excited, which breaks bonds and alters their structure. 

Dry your knitting flat, out of direct sun and store your finished pieces and skeins away from windows.

Pilling is short fibres working their way to the surface and tangling into little balls. It is a property of the fibre and the spin, not a defect, and it happens to the softest yarns most.

Woollen spun bases, singles and low twist yarns pill more than high twist plied ones. Superwash merino pills too, so this is not a superwash versus non superwash question.

Most pilling happens in the first few wears and then settles down once the loose fibres have gone.

Take the pills off with a fabric comb, a sweater stone or careful scissors. Do not pull them, which just drags out more fibre.

A knitted fabric with a firmer gauge pills less than a loose one, so if you are making something that will see a lot of friction (cuffs, underarms, the side of a bag) snug up your gauge.

Yes.

Firstly, blocking is washing. You have passed the entire surface area of hundreds of metres of yarn through the oils and dirt on your hands. You have probably carried the project around with you for weeks. Whatever else blocking does, your finished object needs a bath.

Secondly, it relaxes the stitches, evens out the tension, and it is where our non superwash bases do their thing: the fibres bloom and the fabric fulls gently into a cohesive whole. Colourwork and lace in particular look unfinished before blocking, and lovely after.

Wash as above, then lay the piece between two towels, roll it up, and walk on the jelly roll. That presses out a lot of the water without you wringing the fabric.

But for larger items here's a pro tip:

Tie the wet knit snugly into an old pillowcase or a small wash bag, put it in the machine with a couple of old towels for balance, and run the lowest RPM spin cycle your machine has. Check that the cycle is spin only, with no rinse and no tumble before the spin starts, since the whole point is to keep friction off the work. If your machine insists on tumbling to balance the load, stick with the towels and the jelly roll.

Then lay the piece out to the measurements in your pattern, pin if you need to, and leave it to dry completely.

No. Every skein is dyed by hand and no two are identical, even from the same pot. Colour placement, depth and speckle density will vary. If you are knitting a larger piece, alternate two skeins every couple of rows so any difference blends into the fabric rather than showing up as a stripe where you changed skeins. Buy enough for the whole project at once, and if you need more later, tell us and we will get you as close as we can.

Clean, dry, and closed. Moths and carpet beetles love protein fibre, and they love it most when it has a little sweat and skin on it, so wash pieces before you put them away for the season.

Store skeins and knits in sealed bags or boxes, away from sunlight. Cedar and lavender make things smell nice but they do not kill anything, and they won't save your work from being munched on. 

Everything we've written so far assumes you've got an ordinary skein with regular levels of dye discharge or crocking. Sometimes, though things have gone wrong in the dye pot and we would much rather hear about it than not!

Normal looks like a tint, not inky

The water will go a bit coloured or slightly cloudy, and it clears over two or three rinses. You can see the bottom of the sink or the tub through it

A problem looks like dye. The water colours up strongly and quickly, like weak squash or ink. It keeps doing it after several rinses. The fabric itself looks lighter or patchy afterwards, or a pale section of the piece has taken on a lot of colour from a dark one. Any of that means the fixation failed, and that means we made a mistake. 

If this happens please photograph it. The water, the piece, and the label if you still have it.

Get in touch at contact@thehareandthecrow.com with your order number and the photos.

We will make it right, and we are so so sorry if this has happened to you! Every report tells us something about a dye lot or a formula, and we would rather find out from you than never find out at all!

This applies to the fluorescent colourways too. A steady tint is expected from those forever, but heavy cloudy dye release is not!

Annie and I are both mothers. So of course we have had to find answers to these, and to other, grosser questions.

The good news: you can usually save the knit. The bad news: only up to a point. And whether you do comes down almost entirely to how fast you move.

First, before anything else

Lift off any solids with a spoon or the back of a blunt knife. Do not press them in.

Then rinse. Now. Do not let it sit, we mean it, rinse the thing in heaps and heaps of cold water. Run it from the back of the fabric so it pushes the mess outwards rather than through.

Warm or hot water cooks the protein in blood and milk and sets it permanently. Blood, milk and wool are all proteins, so anything strong enough to shift a set stain will attack the wool along with it. Cold and quick is the whole game.

With vomit there is a second clock running. Stomach acid and enzymes will damage both the fibre and the colour while they sit, so the sooner it is off the yarn the better.

Then

Wash the area with a small amount of plain shampoo, blot, and rinse again in cold water.

For anything still showing, dab with a cloth wetted in cold water and keep blotting until it lifts. For a stubborn or dried mark, wet the area and leave it fifteen minutes to soften before blotting again.

Saliva genuinely works on small, fresh blood spots. It sounds unpleasant, but it is a long standing textile conservation trick and the enzymes in your spit are the reason it works.

If cold water will not shift it

Stop there. Your next step is an enzymatic cleaner, which is covered further down this FAQ. Do not be tempted to reach for warm water and ordinary detergent instead: that combination removes the stain, the colour, and some of the strength of the wool at the same time.

One more thing about vomit

Spot cleaning will deal with the mark but not the smell. You really have to give the whole piece a bath, once you have got the worst of it out.

This is the hardest one. Oil needs warmth and agitation to release, and warmth plus agitation is how you felt wool. Welcome to the proverbial space between the rock and the hard place.

Fresh machine oil, bike chain marks and butter are usually recoverable. Old, oxidised oil often is not.

Your surest bet is a dry cleaner that uses a solvent process. Solvent dissolves grease without water, so there is no swelling, no felting and nothing for the dye to move around in. Ask what they use before you hand anything over, and tell them it is hand knitted and hand dyed.

If you would like to try a dry cleaning fluid at home, in France you can find one like Spado Détachant Universel à Sec. Spado and its like are aliphatic hydrocarbons, and they do a good job on oil, grease, wax, tar and adhesive. Test a hidden area first, read the packet, and do this somewhere well ventilated and away from any flame. It is 🔥flammable.🔥

If you would rather try something less flammable before liberally sprinkling solvent on your jumper:

• First blot up anything still sitting on the surface.
• Cover the area generously with Terre de Sommières, or cornflour (cornstarch, not polenta for those of you in the US) and press it in gently. Leave it several hours or overnight to draw out what it can. Brush it away, or lift the excess with the hoover, and see where you are.
• If a mark remains, put a drop of plain washing up liquid on your fingertip and work it into the mark with a light touch. Leave it a couple of hours. Then blot with a cloth wetted in lukewarm, not hot, water. Repeat rather than scrubbing harder, and always work from behind the stain rather than straight onto the front.
• If your yarn is superwash, a full lukewarm wash with a little washing up liquid in the bath is worth trying next. If it is non superwash, we would rather you accepted a faint shadow than felted the piece.

Right, settle in. I will try to keep this concise.

We tell you to avoid enzyme detergents, and that is best practice. But "enzyme" is not one thing, and for things like blood and vomit the right enzyme is usually the best tool you have. Unfortunately it is also the most destructive tool for protein fibres, so using it on your hand dyed jumper is a calculated risk.

‼️ If you're not sure? Don't risk it. Live with the ghost of the stain or embroider something cute on top of it. ‼️

There are four enzyme types you will meet on a detergent label:

• Protease breaks down protein. This is the one that removes blood, milk, egg and vomit. It is also the one that will digest your wool, because wool is protein. It is the enzyme our general advice is warning you about.
• Lipase breaks down fats and oils. Harmless to wool.
• Amylase breaks down starches. Harmless to wool.
• Cellulase breaks down cellulose. Harmless to wool (actually useless on it) but worth avoiding on anything with a cotton or linen content.

So for an oily mark or a food stain, a spot treatment or detergent listing lipase or amylase but not protease should be OK on your knitting. Read the ingredients rather than the front of the bottle. "Biological" on the front usually means protease is in there, but the ingredient list is where it will be listed.

When you do need a protease

Set in blood, vomit, milk and egg. Nothing we have easy access to but protease will properly shift these. So this is a calculated risk, and here are the conditions that keep it manageable:

• Use cold or tepid water. Laundry proteases are formulated to work swiftly and voraciously at 30 to 40°C and above. Below about 20°C they work slowly, and slow is what we want: enough activity to loosen the stain, not enough to make much progress damaging the fibre.
• Neutral pH. Most laundry proteases work optimally in the alkaline range, around pH 8 to 10, which is also the range that damages wool. A neutral or slightly acidic wash limits the damage.
• keep it Short. Ten to fifteen minutes, maximum. Not a soak, not overnight, and never left to dry on the fabric with the enzyme still active.
• Spot, don't submerge. Apply to the mark, not the garment. There is no reason to expose the whole piece.
• Rinse thoroughly afterwards. Enzymes keep working until they are diluted away or denatured. Rinse in cool water until you are sure it has gone, then a final rinse with a splash of white vinegar, which drops the pH and stops the enzyme action.

Done that way, on superwash or non superwash, you should get away with no perceptible damage.

Enzymes do not attack dye directly, so an enzyme treatment is not itself a bleaching risk. What does move dye is the alkalinity of the product carrying it. Another reason to check the pH and to keep the treatment short and local.

TL;DR

Lipase and amylase: fineish.

Protease: only for blood, milk, egg, and vomit. Only cold, only on the spot, only for ten minutes, and rinse it out properly. Never on the whole garment.

We would still rather you didn't. But if you are going to, these are the conditions that make it less likely to fade your work:

• Wash your hand dye separately from your other clothes.
• Superwash only. Check on the product page if you are unsure. Non superwash in a machine is not a risk, it is an outcome. A very small, felted, doll-sized outcome. 
• Wool or hand wash cycle only. What matters is the drum action. The cycle must have minimal agitation and a short, slow spin.
• Cold, or 20°C at the very most.
• Mesh bag, always. It limits how much the piece moves against the drum and against itself.
• Use non biological, low pH detergent. Almost all regular detergents on the market have enzymes in them which digest protein. This is great for skin oils and blood stains, and whatever else is mucking up our mostly cellulosic (cotton, linen, etc) clothing, but our yarns are made from protein fibres. 
• Never fabric softener, never anything with optical brighteners or bleach (this includes oxygen bleach)
• Lay flat to dry afterwards.

Even done this way, machine washing will shorten the life of the colour. Expect a superwash piece washed this way to look tired and used sooner than one washed by hand.

Almost never.

Heat and tumbling together will felt non superwash. And with long enough heat and tumbling you can felt some superwashes too. Ask us how we know.

Even where it will not felt, it will wear the surface and weaken the fibre, and nylon degrades in high heat, so a sock base loses on both counts.

The narrow cases where it is defensible:

• Hard worn socks. Superwash and nylon, washed constantly, where you have basically decided they are a consumable item. Use low heat, and take them out slightly damp to finish drying flat.
• Rescuing a superwash knit that has stretched or bagged out of shape. Hand wash it, then spin the water out as you normally would. While it is still in its bag, safe from friction and from being thrown about, and only barely damp, put it in the dryer for one to three minutes at a time. Check often and do not let it dry out completely in there. What you are doing is using heat and the last of the moisture to release the stretch the fibres have taken on, and let them relax back towards where they started. Once it has pulled in enough, lay it flat to finish drying.

Two things about that last one. It only works while there is still moisture in the piece, hence the frequent checking. And it only undoes stretching. If the garment was knitted too large in the first place, the dryer will not save you.