Happy Birthday, Dad!

Yesterday was my dad's birthday and I wanted to make something for him. He is a Flyers fan so I thought it would be fun to make some bright orange socks. The problem was that I couldn't find the orange that I wanted in sock yarn. At this point I thought it might be fun to dye some myself. I got some bare knitpicks stroll yarn and lots of orange kool aid. When I got the yarn it looked like this: Click Here

I don't know the final tally of how many packs of orange kool aid it took to get to it's final color but it was a lot! I kept re-dying it with more until I thought it was finally dark enough. I would guess I used around 20 packs by the end.

When it was done and drying it looked like this:

I got some black yarn (also knitpicks stroll) for the heels and toes. These socks became my Alaska project while we were visiting parents last month. (I kept 1 project at my parents house and these stayed at my in-laws house so that my dad wouldn't see them.)

From a distance they look like a solid color, but up close they are tonal with stripes of light and dark orange just because of the way the dye happened to take. I think it makes for an interesting look.

Since my husband was at work I had to model the socks with my own foot which was a little too small. My toe doesn't even come close to the end of the sock.

Hopefully they fit him and will keep his feet toasty warm during hockey season!

Adventures with Kool Aid

Welcome back! First of all, the tank top that I mentioned in my first blog  finally dried and my head still fits through the head hole! It's pretty heavy and won't be as cool as I would like, but I'm glad I went ahead and finished it.

Now to the main subject of the blog- Kool-Aid dying! I learned about this when I was at the fiber studio in Uniontown and had to try it out for my self. Kool-Aid dying works with any animal fiber (not with cotton or other non-animal fibers). It is so easy and fun. You just take a pot of water, get it boiling, add Kool-Aid (without sugar!) then add the yarn/roving.

The yarn (or roving in this case, which will be spun into yarn) absorbs the Kool Aid and the water becomes completely clear. With this batch I used cherry flavored Kool Aid for half the roving and lemonaid for the other half. I spun each color separately and plied them together.

Then, with different yarn I decided to attempt to make a teal color by mixing blue and green. Turned out more green than blue but it was an interesting experiment!

For my next batch of roving I decided that I wanted to experiment with more colors, so I took 8oz of Corridale roving and divided it into 4 chunks. I dyed each piece a different color. I had purple, blue, yellow and green. I then took random  pieces of each color and spun them. Then, by plying them together I ended up with an interesting blend of colors.

What's next? Well, I decided to go for the reds this time. Turns out that cherry and strawberry make the same shade of red. So I took another 8oz of Corridale roving and split it into 4 pieces. Along with the cherry and strawberry there is also pink lemonaide and orange. The goal here is going to be to spin the red together in one single ply strand, then alternate pink and orange in the other strand.

Once those are done I will ply them together and see how it turns out!