Day Off Activities

Yesterday was my regular every other Monday off, and I decided I wanted a project, so I grabbed the last couple of skeins I had of undyed sock yarn, the crock pot, a microwave save Pyrex dish, and all the Kool-Aid and food coloring (plus vinegar) that I had in the pantry.

These are what resulted. The first skein was dyed with regular food coloring with some vinegar (acid and heat set the dye into wool permanently, Kool-Aid is acidic enough on its own that it doesn't need the vinegar, but the food coloring need a good slug). The purple's not as deep as I had hoped for, but it goes with the blue. If I saw this colorway in the yarn shop, I'd definitely give it a second look. This was laid out in a circle on the counter that was well padded with newspaper and a trash bag on top of that to prevent stains. I had the dye mixed into separate squirt bottles, and I squirted one side with the blue and the other side with the purple. The original purple was actually a quite sickly shade, and I had a larger amount of the blue dye, so I eventually put the blue over the whole skein and the purple on around half. I'm hoping that when I knit this up into socks I'll get thin stripes.


And then there's the green. The heat setting for this was done in the crock pot. This is Kool-Aid, a combination of Lemon-Lime and Ice Blue Raspberry; the Lemon-Lime was mixed at a more intense concentration than the blue, which is why this is way more green than I originally planned. I was going for kind of a peacock color, but I really like this a lot, and the semi-solid will be good for another pair of socks that has an interesting stitch pattern going on.