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Mess Errata
Some things I forgot to mention what with all the pictures….
Yarn: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes (worsted) and Color Your Own (fingering). Super cheap at $3/220yds and $3.50/440yds respectively. And fast shipping. And because we didn’t start until well after 10pm, we only did one skein each and I have a ton left over.
Microwaving: 3 cycles of 2 mins nuke, 2 mins rest. Leave the ziplock open a bit to let the steam escape. Be careful when pulling it out — it gets HOT!!! This sets the dye and it works really well. When I rinsed my skein later, the water was all clear.
Kool-Aid: Despite having several scientists in the room, we didn’t follow a scientific process at all. So I can’t tell you which colors did what. The murky orange you see near the front of the cup photo is Mango Mango or Pina-Pineapple, and was the orangey color in Steph’s yarn. The murky blue and green (at the front right) were also quite lovely in yarn. I think they were something like Ice Blue something and Arctic Green Apple.
When I get around to dyeing up the rest of the yarn I have, I’ll try to document a little more.
But what’s really needed is some sort of Kool-Aid exchange program, with a single site to visit make requests and trades. Each of us found very different flavors available in the stores near us. I went to 3 different chain grocers and still others found flavors that I couldn’t.
To sum up the experience, Laura says: “Yarn dying is a fascinating, yet incredibly smelly process. When that wet dyed saran wrapped yarn came out of it’s third cycle of the microwave it smelled like a million wet dogs bathed in kool aid and vinegar, then baked in the sun for a million years. But it smelled nice when it dried!”