I have never dyed yarn before, and honestly I was intimidated. What I
have dyed a lot though is frosting and white chocolate. I love the
“gel” food coloring that you can buy at Michael’s or any store that has
a “cake decorating” section. This isn’t the liquid food coloring drops,
this is food coloring in a gel form so the color is super
concentrated–you don’t need much to get a really vibrant color. Try it
in melted white chocolate, then spoon your white chocolate into a zip
loc bag, cut off the corner and drizzle over thick pretzels that you’ve
dunked in melted caramel–so yummy and they make a great personalized
gift for sports team lovers, or…oh wait, what was I talking about?

I got to join in the dye-along, even though I’m in the computer geek
department rather than the creative department. But that also means
that I managed to do pretty much everything wrong. It turned out well,
anyway. At least, I like how it is going so far. So for anyone who has
never dyed before, I think it will probably turn out ok, even if you do
everything wrong, like me!

I used 3 different flavors of Kool-Aid to dye my sock blanks –
Watermelon Cherry, Cherry, and Black Cherry. My husband and I are
adopting 3 teenagers, so I wanted to make pink socks for Liza (12), as
that is her favorite color, and red socks for Dasha (14), as that is her
favorite color. And in the interest of fairness, though I’m not sure he
will wear them, I wanted to make dark red socks for Max (16), since red
is also his favorite color, and dark red seemed a bit more macho than the bright red.

At this point I have two lovely sock blanks. I am going to be knitting with two strands held together for each of my Shape It Scarves from The Knit Stitch by Sally Melville.

The appeal of dying sock blanks is the never-ending possibilities. You can choose to be creative in a linear fashion or be abstract. I sound like an art museum docent. I chose to give linear a try for the blanks I was dyeing for my Shape-It Scarves.

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at dyeing for a while now. The
thought of the mess, the equipment and doing a really bad job at it kept
me from trying. But, after I found out there was going to be a
dyealong, I thought, hey! Perfect opportunity! Now I can at least
commiserate with others who have also made a giant mess. So, I got some
sock blanks, let myself get inspired, and dove right in.

I decided to try acid dyes, since it’s relatively low-odor and I
could do it indoors (with proper ventilation, of course). That proved to
be an advantageous decision, because when I got ready to dye it was
raining! I got all my supplies together and started the process.