Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Fun with Kool-Aid

Stef!-the-weaving-guru informed me last week that my deadline for the Philosopher's sweater is this Saturday. First I went very pale, then I went home and started knitting. A lot. I have 1.5 rounds to go. Expert or no expert, I will be done with the knitting tonight. I am not posting a picture because it looks an awful lot like the last one, but taller.

I took a couple of breaks from frenzied knitting and played with Kool-Aid. I've been hearing for years stories of using Kool-Aid as dye, for hair and for yarn. This weekend, I suddenly had the burning desire to try it; my hope was that I could use it to dye some of a massive amount of cotton that I have, but that is not to be. Despite the experience of parents everywhere, I read that Kool-Aid doesn't really dye cotton, so when I skeined up my (wool) yarn, I used natural colored cotton to tie the skeins, and none of those ties took the color. Go figure.



Left to right we have: Cherry, Orange (this should be brighter), Green Apple, Grape (should a little paler), and Strawberry. I was surprised that the Strawberry was more saturated than the Cherry. I'm thinking of a child's sweater using the Orange and Strawberry.


I had extra Grape, Orange and Cherry packets, so I played around with varigating a skein. It didn't turn out quite as nicely as I was hoping (a little pale in places), but Len thought it would make very nice socks. For him. Preferable to wear to some sort of formal event put together by his mother or sister. Freak.

2 comments:

Brandy said...

You should also try Wilton cake colorings. You do have to soak the wool in water with a couple of glugs of vinegar though. You can get some good strong colors with a saturated solution.

I have been working with kool-aid for quite a while and have only recently messed around with some Cushings dyes.

Anonymous said...

But how does it taste?