Wednesday, January 03, 2007

It's HEEEEEEEEEEEERE!!!
Yep, can you see it. I had to order it from Amazon.com It was THAT hard to find blue and green Kool Aid. Now I have SO much. 72 packets of each color as a matter of fact. The good news about Kool Aid though is if you get tired of dying with it you can drink it. Tastes great with Splenda. Even DS can drink blue and green colors. I can hardly wait to dye with it. In my head I have imagined rainbows of colors flowing from purple to green to blue. Doesn't it sound beautiful. Mmm, I can almost smell those delicious colors.

Now, on about my Kool aid dyed self-striping yarn that I made for DD. I used Knitpicks, superwash fingering. It was quite a lot of work. I started by winding small sections on my Niddy noddy (10 winds around) then tying tiny strings onto those sections (sorry for the painfully blurry pic!)

Next I separated them into 3 separate sections going in a left to right then right to left placing one section in each pile (yeah the strings on the bottom became tangled, don't ask what I was thinking). Then I started by gathering up each section and tying it together, I then made a bed of plastic wrap for it in my casserole dish and began pouring on one color. I carefully bound up that section and slid it to the side of the dish then made another plastic wrap bed and placed in the next section and dyed it. For the red and white section I poured on stripes using a 1 tsp medicine dropper. After all 3 sections were bound up I poured some extra water over the bags and stuck it in the microwave. I nuked it initially for 3 minutes to get it good and hot, then I did a 2 minute nuke, 10 minute cooling repeating cycle until the water was clear. I rinsed it out. Then spend a frustrating 3 hours untangling it (whoops, what was I thinking!?) Apparently I didn't take any pics of that part (must be my shame) nor did I take a pic of the finished skein. But here is the project I made with it. That hat is knitted out plain so you can see the color transitions coming out the way I dyed them. The mittens are knitted from finger ends to wrist cuff and the thumb was added last.
I learned 5 things doing this. 1. This is not a good way to divide the yarn because it gets all tangled up (I am thinking of a solution for this I'll keep you posted). 2. Purple requires several packets of Kool aid or you get a lot of variegation in between blue and purple (which comes out nice, but if you wanted an absolute solid you need to make sure you saturate it with color). I used 2 packets of grape and still got that much variegation 3. Wrapping tightly in separate sections of color works really good to prevent bleeding. 4. When making stripes, on a section to try and make that nifty fair isle look make sure you don't over saturate the section or it bleeds a lot on the bottom unbeknownst to you and ruins the stripe effect because the yarn on the bottom comes out mostly the color and a lot less stripey. 5. I can hardly wait to do this again!!!

1 comment:

Teenuh said...

lol you are crazy. But at least you are entertaining in your madness! ;)

Oh, pink lemonade is what I'm supposed to look for? Let me know! I will go exploring! (Have you looked at WalMart?)

Love the mittens and the hat! The hat is awesome how well the striping turned out! Very cool. I can't wait to dye with you! :)