Adventures with Kool-Aid

I received my first KnitPicks order a short while ago and thought I'd have some fun with using Kool-Aid to hand dye it. It was a learning experience. I think it was good to try out a few expendable hanks before I start doing any serious hand dyeing.

Before starting, I did some research online and thought I'd try Black Cherry and Lemon-Lime for the first two hanks. The online samples that others had posted showed the Black Cherry as a nice deep red and the lemon-lime as a chartreuse-y green. Based upon other's recommended Kool-Aid to yarn ratios, I used 4 packets of color for each dye session. (Check out KnitPick's Kool-Aid dyeing tutorial. There is also a wealth of additional information to be had if you do a quick search.) The hanks were 100 grams (220 yards) each. I also added a little white vinegar to the dye baths.



The results I got with the Black Cherry were more on the burnt sienna side. A nice color but not exactly what I wanted. Figuring this would be a good opportunity to experiment with overdyeing, I dyed it a second time with another batch of Wild Cherry with a few drops of red food coloring added in. It was still on the brown side, I so I overdyed it again with regular cherry Kool-Aid. I did over-handle the yarn and it started to felt ever so slightly.



It fascinated me that the water was completely clear when the dye bath was exhausted.



The resulting shade over 3 dye sessions was still not quite what I wanted... but I could live with it.



My next experiment was with Lemon-Lime. I was going for variations in shading here.



Again, I wasn't terribly happy with the results of the shading so I dyed it a second time with Pink Lemonade and Lemonade. It is a little on the fug side where the pink and green overlapped... but I don't really have any complaints. I'm chalking it all up to a learning experience.