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I’ve
always been curious about dyeing yarn, but I was intimidated by the safety
precautions you need to take with dyes that aren’t food safe (although now that
Kelley and Kerin have given us some pointers, I am feeling more confident). Then
Nina pointed me towards the What a Kool Way to Dye group on Ravelry, and I
couldn’t wait to give Kool Aid dyeing a try. My local grocery store didn’t have
a huge variety of flavors, so I picked up two of everything they had.

I’m
impatient, so I only soaked my sock blank for about 20 minutes in plain water, while I heated up the Kool Aid.

I
wanted to see if there was a color difference between Tropical Punch and
Cherry, so I boiled two separate pots of Kool Aid, and dipped each end in a
different flavor. 

Since I pre-soaked the blank, the reds slowly rose out each
pot and met in the middle, where they faded to pink.

Three
lessons learned:

1.I didn’t expect the
yarn to exhaust the color as quickly or completely as it did. It sucked up
all the red dye in just a couple minutes! When I rinsed my blank, the
water was completely clear. This is all that was left of the dye in the water from the pot. I
should have bought more red Kool Aid for blank #2.

2.You can get really
bright colors with Kool Aid. I had no idea!! Check out this red!

3.Tropical Punch and
Cherry are slightly different reds, Cherry is a tiny bit deeper. Tropical
Punch is a tad more pink, but they’re really pretty close. We’ll have to
see what they look like knit up.

Here’s
a look at my finished sock blank, plus a sneak peek at blank #2. More about that one soon…