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.
