Yarn, Sun & Kool Aid - a knitter's summer

Two weeks back a streak of hot weather and sunny days and leftover yarn from the blanket and a rediscovery of Kool-Aid / Weyler's in a cabinet make me want to try solar dyeing. My first experience with Kool-Aid Dyeing came out pretty well, though I still haven't worked up that yarn (or dyed the other skein).

I started with this:

Pretty, but I just didn't love that brown-gold section.


I started just before 10, and the grape smell was delicious (4 packets of Wylers that I bought at Big Y - I checked Big Y today and they don't have kool-aid packets.) This was on the front porch.


Around 12:30 I moved the bowl to the driveway - I think that temperature is acutally the temperature of the driveway, not the bowl - it was hard to hold it and get the focus on the camera and take the photo at the same time. Anyway, it was very warm.


Around 2:30, it clouded over and maybe 5 minutes later we had a HUGE thunderstorm with downpours.


Ta-dah! There is still a little hint of the brown-gold, but it doesn't bother me so much any more. I adore the shade of purple this came out. It might become a Sunday Market Shawl for around the house, or Koolhaas.

K.A.D.E.

(psst, one more day for my blog contest!)

Kool Aid Dyeing Experiment.

When I went grocery shopping the packets of Kool Aid caught my eye. And two packets of Strawberry jumped into my cart.

I have two skeins of yarn in my stash, that I got in a swap a long time ago. The colors (mostly blues) are totally me, but there's a spot (or two or three) of gold-ish / brown that just wasn't totally me. No tags on it, so I'm not really sure of what it is even. Seemed like a good subject on which to try the Kool Aid. I was hoping that red + blues = purples of any shade.

I quickly read up on the tutorials for this from knitty.com and knitpicks.com (.pdf file). I scanned other knit-bloggers too. But mostly I jumped right in, pretty much against all my science background / training - I didn't follow any exact procedure. But I did document!

Here's one skein, soaking in some roughly room temperature tap water.


Here's the strawberry kool aid and the still soaking yarn.


When I moved the yarn to the Kool Aid, I noticed something surprising. The water the yarn was soaking in was now blue! Interesting, though I don't know (or care much) if it impacts this K.A.D.E.


After 4 or 5 times under microwave action (2 minutes each), the water was getting to the pink-ish side of "clear" (though, in my opinion, when they say "Clear" "Colorless" is implied. The water was "clear" to begin with. end science-nerdy-rant) and currently I'm letting it cool before I rinse it and then find someplace to hang it to dry.


After a rinse, hanging on a hanger in the laundry room overnight....

Love. It's more reds / purple-ish that are rather berry-like. Fantastic!

Now I'm out of Kool Aid, so I need to decide if skein #2 will also get a Strawberry Bath or if I should try another color.