How to dye with Koolaid - SUCCESS!

The Mamajama and I, with the strict supervision of Poppy and LeeLuu, had our first dying workshop! We had hoped to use both Jacquard and Koolaid for dying, but we had so much fun with the Koolaid that we never got to the Jacquard.

The Mamajama took Notes:

KoolAid Workshop Aug 15 2008

Yarn: Treadsoft 2ply Superwash merino wool.
Mom bought a cone of yarn. I'll have to get her to add the website to the comments. I skeined up approximately 50 grams of the yarn with my trusty niddy noddy. Its a bit thinner than fingering weight, which was frankly a bit of a disappointment. We had great debates about if we should keep it or not. Mom also got some bare "worsted" weight for Claire, but my wraps-per-inch tool told me it was more like a DK weight. But, it should work regardless.

The Procedure:
We soaked the yarn in warm tap water for about a hours. Actually, it was probably closer to two. I put the yarn in to soak and then we decided to have dinner (Three Cheers for Kelbasa! We had a culinary celebration of our Slavic roots!). Once dinner was done, we covered the table with news papers and got ready to go!

After we squeezed out the yarn skeins, we laid them out on a double layer or plastic wrap. For the first two skeins, we mixed one cup of water with one packet of Koolaid. Then we went to town with foam brushes! One thing we did notice was that the dye did not soak all the way down so we had to flip the skeins over to get even color distribution.

Mom did Little Girls Dream. She used 1 package of pink lemonade and 1 package of grape.

I did Morning Grasshopper (named because we met a grasshopper the next morning who was the exact same shade of green!). I used 1package of Lemon lime. and 1 package of ice blue with 1/2 a package of grape mixed in, that produced a lovely periwinkle.

After we painted the yarn, we sprayed it with full strength white vinegar (I bought a gallon jug of it for $1.89!) .

With our next experiment, we laid out two more skeins. This time, we added a tablespoon of vinegar IN with each cup of color. Mom said she did not notice any difference. I felt like the dye got immediately sucked up exactly where you put it. I found it more difficult to "push" the color around.

Mom did Tropical Sunrise with 2 packages of cherry, 2 of orange, 2 of lemonade, mixed into individual cups with 1 cup of water and one table spoon of vinegar.






I did Tropical Sunset using the same orange and lemonade but with 2 packages of black cherry. As you can see, the reds do make a big difference!








The last skein we did was Shaken Not Stirred - Bombay Sapphire and I'm not telling how we did this one!! Trade Secrets!!!!

After we dyed each skein, we rolled them up in the plastic wrap and steamed them for about 30 minutes each. Then we rinsed and dried! Its very exciting. We had so much fun, and we have to restrain our selves from immediately dying more!!!