Hi Diane, I bought some soy silk yarn and found that the dye washed out in practically anything I used. I ran an experiment -- All laundry detergent essentially stripped out all the dye; Dawn dishwashing liquid came close as did Oxyclean; even Suave lavender shampoo took out about half the color. My assumption is that it was dyed with a "cotton" or cellulose dye. I stripped out the color on one of the skeins and redyed it with Kool-Aid, which takes just fine. And Merike Saarnit says that in her experience (which she admits is not extensive), acid dyes take well on soy silk. (Although she told me I might want to use Rit dye just to be on the safe side.) Soy silk is made from the residue of tofu production. Tofu is protein. The seed of the soy plant is protein. If the fiber came from the rest of the plant, it would dye with cellulose dyes. That is my take on the subject anyway. Buying this yarn is probably the most expensive mistake I've ever made in the fiber arena, but I am doing a lot of experimenting on it.
Beware if you try to strip or dye this fiber because apparently it is irreparably damaged by too much heat. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the message I received about this, but there is a temperature above which the fiber becomes stiff and scratchy (very un-silk like!). Maybe someone else on the list can add to this. I did destroy one skein of yarn, apparently by overheating it either in the stripping or the dyeing (or both). It is now pretty useless because I can't think of a single thing I could do with it in this state, except maybe tie up plants in the garden! This is only my opinion, based on my own experience and experiments, YMMV. Pamm in Milwaukee To stop mail temporarily mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: set nomail To restore send: set mail
