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April 24, 2007

Cooking Wool and Drink Mix

Yesterday I got the urge to dye yarn for socks. Not that I don't have some colorful ready-to-knit sock yarn already.

A few months ago I bought a generous number of blue KoolAid packets on clearance for about a nickle a pop. So each of the five dye pots started with two packs. Then I added a yellow, tan, green, light green, and another blue. Draped the damp yarn in the jars and slid the whole thing into the microwave (thank goodness for removeable turntables!). Here are views of the five loaded jars.

That brown one looked olive green in person, and I was surprised that they dye came out cocoa brown. It was a good surprise.


Here's the resulting colorful wool cake, snapped in overcast conditions on my "antique" milk box.

The colors are more intense and greener in person. This scan is more accurate, but not perfect, as the yarn is much more blue and green than it appears in either picture.


The second Gras Jaywalker is about half done; I knit about half the heel flap last night. By pure chance, the color segments on the two socks are identical so far. Maybe the second heel will have a sock money mouth, too!

ADDED LATER: Here are the five color "recipes" I used:

Brown: 4 ice blue + 2 tamarindo

Blue 2?: 3 ice blue + 1 lemonade

Blue 1: 3 ice blue

Green 1: 2 ice blue + 1 lime

Green 2: 2 ice blue + 1 arctic green

I suspect a "secret" to easy color creation is to start with a base color and tweak for more colors. Here, my base is 2 ice blue packs. One combination I tried and rejected was ice blue + black cherry, but the red overpowered the blue and I didn't want a christmassy effect.

3 comments:

Laura said...

OOOH! Pretty!

Femmy said...

WOW! I have been trying to get a brown like with Kool aid forever. How did you do it????

auntiemichal said...

Femmy, according to my sketchy notes, the brown was 4 packs of Ice Blue and 2 packs of Tamarindo. I was expecting to to come out as olive green, but the brown is OK, too.