It would seem that the secondary technique of letting the yarn soak on cold in the Kool-Aid gave me more coverage than letting soak in just plain water and heating with the color. You can see the results here (from left to right): black cherry, strawberry, tropical punch, and watermelon/cherry. The black cherry resulted in a brick color, which does not look great on me. The watermelon/cherry was a pale dusty rose; quite pretty, but not really what I was going for. That left the two middle skeins. I overdyed the strawberry with the extra cherry packet. It now looks very similar to the tropical punch, yet more vivid. Both are pretty close to a blood red. I have a friend bringing me back some more tropical punch from the states. If I can get the tropical punch as vivid, it would be easier to dye that at double strength than to dye everything strawberry then cherry. With the number of dye batches I am going to need, I am a bit worried about variations in the color. I hope to swatch up the strawberry/cherry in the meantime to see how it looks and get a first stab at the gauge.
In two days we are off to Madrid. I have never been to Spain before, so I am looking forward to the tapas. Luckily we have a friend house sitting, so the ferret will not be lonely. Any recommendations? We plan to mostly hit up the museums near our hotel and eat a bunch of food. I have brought the baby on vacation to visit family before, but have never tried sightseeing, so we don’t want to overbook ourselves.
Thanks to my wonderful sister (who mailed me the Kool-Aid), I got to start my Epic Sweater project yesterday. The lovely natural brown alpaca yarn I have seemed too brown for an entire coat, so I am working on making it the perfect red. I had never dyed yarn before, so I hit up the internet for some tutorials. The one at Knitty.com is great because they show a bunch of different flavors on white yarn. The Piper and Snowangels were helpful as general how-tos. I am recording my method here for posterity.
Since I am experimenting with color, I wound 4 smaller hanks of about one ounce each. Notice the really high-tech glass bowl method.
I received five Kool-Aid flavors in the mail: strawberry, watermelon-cherry, black cherry, tropical punch, and cherry (not shown). I am going to keep the cherry as a backup in case I want to experiment with over dyeing one of the colors. The base yarn is a pretty rich brown, so it will be interesting to see how the red reacts.
The first method I tried involved soaking the yarn in a stainless steel pot of hot water for 30 min, then putting the dye in and simmering for a further 30 min at about 180 F. I used this method for the black cherry and strawberry flavors. There was still some brown spots showing through after the process was complete. I was afraid of agitating the yarn too much while it was hot (for fear of felting it), so I think the dye was not incorporated as well as it could have been. For the tropical punch and watermelon-cherry flavors, I instead let the yarn soak in cold water with the dye already mixed in (1 packet per ounce of yarn, just like the others) for 30 min and then heating the whole kit-and-kaboodle. The yarn for those two are still drying, so I can’t attest to whether this method provides better coverage or not yet.
Sorry for the long hiatus. It seems that sleep deprivation makes blogging take a back seat. Lilo just turned six months old and stuff is about to get real over here. I know that crawling is imminent- the poor ferret is going to be chased from one side of the house to the other.
Our trip to Belgium was awesome, as always. It was quite chilly, so Lilo got to show off her cute jacket with the bear ears!
We went out to eat a bunch (you always eat well in Belgium). Lilo loves people watching at the restaurants. She is starting to stand while holding onto things like the coffee table and she definitely wants to crawl. She kinda flails on her belly like an upturned bug, but I am sure one day she is just going to figure it out and then there will be no stopping her. Did I mention I dyed my hair black? I am digging the look, so I am going to keep it for a while. 
Mamouche and Papouche watched Girlie for a night so that her Poppa and I could have a belated second anniversary dinner. I had two glasses of wine! It was heavenly.
As for myself, in between not sleeping, feeding a baby, making baby food and trying to convince her to drink out of a sippy cup, we are trying to make a new routine. She is getting older and more social, so we are starting her in a music class and a Gymboree class. The first one is on Tuesday, so I shall report back how it went. I am starting to study for the patent bar exam. I hope that in a few months I can start applying for jobs again and I think this is the direction I want to go. For fun though, I am dying yarn. I got gifted some lovely alpaca yarn from a friend. I am doing an epic sweater coat project. Dying the yarn, knitting it up, then lining the coat. I have 4 kool-aid colors to try (with a 5th saved in case I want to overdye one of the other colors). I started with Black Cherry today and I hope to post updates as I go along.
