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!

Hello World!

Welcome to post #1 of the CrystalCrafts blog. This is a place where I can keep track of what I'm working on while sharing them with you at the same time. In fact, over the last few days I finished some projects that I want to show off. The first one is a knit tank top. The pattern comes from Lion Brand and it is called the All Season Shell (60433). I used 100% cotton yarn (Loops and Threads Brand Cotton Club in Wild Rose) in the hopes that it would be nice and cool for the summer. Turns out the yarn is thicker than I intended and it may not be as cool as I wanted, but we'll just have to see what happens. At the moment it has been washed and it drying in my craft room. I am very glad it turned out since the first attempt was kind of a failure. I finished it, went to try it on, and my head didn't fit through the head hole. Oh no! Anyway, I Un-did the shoulder seam, picked up the stitches, added a few rows and used kitchner stitch to seam it back together (which looks a lot smoother than when I had sewn it).  I tried it on again and voila! my head fits through the head hole. Yipee! I don't have a picture of me wearing it yet, but here it is drying:

The next project that I recently finished was a diamond pattern crochet hat. This hat is kind of special because it is the first item I made from fiber that I completely processed myself. A friend of mine gave me wool from her sheep. First step: skirting. I took the wool out of the bag, got rid of the dirtiest parts and saved the rest.

For this step I decided to take the wool out to the porch. I bought some cotton zip-up pillow cases to put the wool in for the next step: washing.

Then it was bath tub time. I turned up the water as hot as possible, filled up the tub, and the wool went swimming. The tricky part here is making sure that the wool is not agitated because heat+water+agitation=felting which means a huge blob of wool that cannot be spun. 

After combing out the wool with some dog undercoat rakes (which I will never have to do again since i got some awesome home made wool combs- thanks Dad!) I spun it on my amazing Kromski Sonata. I ended up with quite a bit of yarn. (576 yards if you want to know exactly how much.)

I took 1 hank, dyed it with blue raspberry kool aid and crocheted it into a hat:

Voila!

Now I'm off to go work on a new project. Not sure what it will be yet, but I'll let you know when I figure it out!