new addiction

My new addiction is dyeing sock yarn with Kool-Aid. It's crazy! I mean, I don't even knit socks that often and there are actually a lot of things about hand-dyeing that don't excite me one bit. I hate self-striping yarns and I'm not a big fan of wild variegated colors, and those are two things that lots of knitters love about hand-dyed sock yarn. I do enjoy the subtle kettle-dyed look, though, and there's just something fun about dumping drink mix into a pot of water and making pretty yarn out of it.

Also, so far Daniel doesn't realize that Kool-Aid is something that can be mixed with sugar and drunk. He thinks it's just for making yarn and coloring play-doh, and that's just fine with me. In fact, the orange skein in the picture below was a mix of orange and lemonade in exact imitation of some kool-aid play-doh we made at Steph's house last week after the original batch got too much cat hair on it. (Ewww).



Here are a few things I've learned about dyeing with Kool-Aid:

1. Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade is a horrid aqua/turquoise color.
2. It can not be fixed with a dash of Black Cherry.
3. In fact, said mixture looks like ass.
4. But if you overdye it with many packets of grape, it will turn into a lovely, lovely deep burgundy. (That got left at Steph's place, so you'll just have to imagine how pretty it is because we didn't get a picture.)
5. It's easier to have success with the red/orange family than blue/purple. I don't know if it's my fault or the Kool-Aid's; I'm still pretty new at this.





I don't know exactly what I'll do with all this yarn I'm dyeing. If I can get good colors I may give the yarn itself as gifts to my knitting friends come their birthdays. Some of it I'll use myself. I have no interest in selling it on Etsy or anything like that. The nice thing about dyeing sock yarn is that you don't need to do that much at once and crazy colors are okay. Fun, even.