To Dye For

For years now, I've wanted to play around with dyeing my own yarn with household food-safe dyes. To be honest, I've done it once or twice in the past for little projects when I needed some yarn. Once, I used coffee to dye the yarn for these socks:

and another time I used some food coloring to dye the itty bit of red yarn I needed for these socks:



But I've heard so many stories about how fun it is to use Kool-Aid and Easter egg pellets to dye wool that I knew I wanted to try it for myself some day. One thing holding me back was not knowing what I would use it for once I had it colored, and the other thing was just never getting around to it. Well, Easter came around again and reminded me of my desire to go all woolly mad scientist in the kitchen. At the same time, I've been throwing ideas around in my head for mittens to replace the ones I lost this winter. The two thoughts converged and suddenly I had a plan.

Last week I brought home the necessary ingredients from the grocery store along with my regular weekly shopping, I dragged the girls to the yarn store for some nice, white Cascade 220, and on Sunday I found enough time to get started.

Sophie was asleep in the swing (how could I deprive the world of a Sophie picture in a blog post)


Julie came in the kitchen to help out, and got to play with a big bowl of water and some spoons and measuring cups. What two-year-old could ask for more?


I knew that collection of Ball jars in the basement was there for a reason - they are the perfect vessels for small dyeing projects. I don't think I've ever seen this many empty Kool-Aid packages at one time in my life. We weren't allowed to drink much of the stuff when I was a kid. At the time I thought it was horrible, but now I have no desire to drink the stuff or serve it to my kids. Heck, Julie is thrilled when I let her drink apple juice!


I split up the three skeins of Cascade 220 into .70-ounce mini-skeins so that I would have enough chunks of yarn to try each of the Kool-Aid colors I had bought plus each of the 6 pellets that come in a box of PAAS. For the Kool-Aid, I left the mini-skeins twisted and fully expected to get the flecks of white that I ended up with in the finished product. For the PAAS, I tried un-twisting the skeins and still ended up with the white flecks. It's an experiment, and I think it looks cool either way, so I'm fine with that. Here is the first batch of yarn all set for a nice steam bath in my big ole canning pot.


And here is Miss Julie admiring the results. The PAAS yarn is drying on the swift (and little duckie is getting a ride on the top - I think I've finally found a place to keep that thing, a gift for Sophie from some friends, where Julie will keep her sticky little mitts off it). The Kool-Aid yarn is already wound and ready for knitting on the table. Notice the other stuffed animals watching the process - more gifts for Sophie; and if you look out the window you can see that our next door neighbors have started setting their large collection of lawn ornaments back out for the summer.


If you're interested in how to go about dyeing your own Kool-Aid wool, check out this article on Knitty.com.