Dyeing Is Fun

I ordered this yarn a few weeks ago from knitpicks.com and was so excited I read everything I could find about dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid. Apparently 100 percent wool takes dye better than wool blends. So, being the loser I am, I ordered 2 skeins of sock yarn that is a wool/acrylic blend. When I first ordered the yarn I thought I would take my time before I got around to dyeing it to figure out exactly what I wanted the yarn to look like, the best way to accomplish it and to look around in more than one store for just the right flavors of Kool-Aid. In my brain I could see a mixture of blues and greens for one skein and a mixture of reds, pinks and purples for the other and I knew it would be either variegated or self-striping. I have to say, that yarn looked amazing in my head.

So I immediately ran out to Walgreen's to buy Kool-Aid. What do you know, Walgreens does not sell Kool-Aid in the typical little packets, they only had bottles of pre-made Kool-Aid. So I sucked it up and went to Wal-Mart where they had the full Kool-Aid collection. I started grabbing packets and ended up with Grape, Pink Lemonade and Cherry for the red/pink/purple skein and Lemon-Lime, Black Cherry and Berry Blue for the green/blue skein, don't ask me how I thought Black Cherry fit into that category.

A few days later when I got the yarn I broke out the baby shampoo and gave the yarn a bath, rinsed it a few times and left it to soak while I mixed each Kool-Aid packet with a few tablespoons of water (I bought three packets of Grape and Lemon-Lime and two packets of the other flavors). Then I went looking for a turkey baster or something similar to use to squirt the Kool-Aid on the yarn in stripes. This is also when I realized we do not have a turkey baster or anything remotely like a syringe in any way. I had to get super creative, so I used a spoon. Not ideal, but it worked well enough. It looks a little weird in this condition. Like a colorful toy snake after being washed. I originally decided to hang the yarn outside to dry, but I heard thunder and brought it back inside seconds before it started to rain. The yarn took a full day to dry and somewhere along the line it turned into a huge mess and I spent three days untangling it and rolling it into a ball.

On to the next skein, I wanted to try out another approach, so I washed the other skein and set up the Kool-Aid glasses in a circle, or triangle I guess, since there were three of them. I put a third of the yarn into each glass and microwaved it. It was kind of strange because the Kool-Aid/water combos in the glasses before I put the yarn in them was very dark, and after it was a slightly cloudy white.

I was extremely careful with the second skein, so it did not tangle as badly as the first one, and despite all the problems, I enjoyed myself thourougly. I recommend everyone dye some yarn, and then send it to me. So there you have it, just look at those balls.










By the way, has anyone seen the commercial for these crackers that are a pretzel on one side and a cracker on the other side? It is just weird. Why would you ever need a double-sided cracker pretzel?