I’ve done as much searching as I possibly can and the best I can come up with is a lot of conflicting accounts. Some say it can, some say it can’t. Some say it can, but with pale results … So I must take this to the teemings where I can trust the answers! I’m puzzled beyond all belief - like that’s a new state of mind for me - and if it is dyable, recommended methods?
I’ve never tried it (only wool and cotton) but everything I’ve heard says that it won’t dye well.
You can always use a small sample and give it a shot…
Well, of course acrylic yarn can be dyed - that’s why it comes in so many different colors.
I assume the question is can you dye it at home, with amateur-level dye equpiment?
Probably not. The dyes used in commercial acrylic yarn production are pretty potent chemicals, it is very much an industrial process. If you could obtain these specialized dyes, yes, you probably could do this at home but I’d very strongly advise protective gear while doing so.
The home-dye stuff - natural dyes, RIT dyes, etc. - will not work on acrylic. You’ll get some color, but very little (the pale effect). Certain things that stain will color acrylic yarn - beet juice, pomagranite, coffee, red wine, etc - but the results are inconsistent and will fade over time.
Broomstick is perfectly correct, but left out an important fact. Not only are special dyes used, but the yarns are dyed in what amounts to pressure cookers. The yarn is on large cones and the pressure is great enough that the color is forced into the entire cone and into the fibres to an extent you couldn’t possibly match at home.
In an organic chemistry lab we synthesized the compound commonly known as “methyl red”, a dye. Once it was made, and we’d done the IR and NMR etc to confirm what we’d made, we were allowed to have a bit of “fun”. We were given strips of cloth, which were composed of pieces of wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and something else (I remember there were 5). We soaked the strip in our methyl red for a couple of days, then came back, rinsed, and had the joy of seeing what had dyed and what hadn’t. This was about 4 years ago, so I don’t remember the results exactly, but I remember that one was a very deep red, another a bright red, one was kind of orange, the other very pale yellow, and the one that stayed white was the acrylic yarn.
If you look around, there are some dyes available that would be feasible for homebrew use. For instance, there’s the PROSperse range - though the makers comment that even these will only ‘take’ on acrylic sufficiently to give pastel shades.
Thanks for all of the help, I’ll see what I can do from here with my own experimentation then post the results 