We finally got around to dyeing yarn with kool-aid this last Tuesday. It was a perfect day for it to, 85 degrees out and later it got a little windy, so the yarn dried very quickly.
My neighbor, Bea (pronounced Bay-Ah) came over and helped because we needed to borrow her microwave as we don't have one. She was tremendously helpful as I realized taking on yarn dyeing with two little ones by myself really wasn't so wise. Especially considering I had 8 skeins to dye. Solomon had a lot of fun squirting the kool-aid onto the yarn and really got into it at times. Typical to a four year old he also wasn't at all into it at other times. Margo got a couple of good wild squirts in but mostly had fun watching and helping pick up kool-aid packets.
Technique: Let four year randomly squirt kool-aid mixture (about 80z water to one packet kool-aid, mixed up in dollar store condiment bottles). Encourage him not to squirt one color over the other and then fill in white areas that he's forgotten. Put in casserole dish, cover with plastic wrap and hand to helpful neighbor to take to over to her place to put in microwave for 2.5 minutes, hang on line, let dry. Now, I should have probably put the skeins in the bath tub at this point and rinsed before line drying, but you do what you can to get through when working with kids. I'm figuring I'll rinse out the sweater when I'm done knitting it and hopefully the color will stay and it's kind of fun knitting with fruity smelly yarn! I would recommend tying off sections of the skein, I thought I could skip this as the skein already came mostly secure but it did get messed up a little (one got messed up a lot) and it took an entire evening of untangling skeins and winding into balls. So by being lazy I made more work for myself (what else is new?).
So if any one really wants to know we went for the rainbow color effect (because Solomon wanted a multi-colored sweater and I thought rainbow would be fun). Although working with so many different colors is a little more stressful.
Here's what we used for our colors purple: grape, blue: berry blue twist, green:lemon-lime, yellow:lemonade, orange: orange, red: cherry.
The berry blue was the hardest to find. I went to many different grocery stores and finally scored at a Albertsons. The grape wasn't the greatest purple in my opinion, I think I should have tried mixing cherry and berry blue, but I'll know for next time and the yellow was really weak- maybe there's another flavor out there or mix in a wee bit of orange to give it a little more bang? the cherry and the blue were definitely my favorites. Because the grape was such a strong color I ended up diluting it more than the other colors towards the end and ended up with a left-over packet of kool-aid, so we mixed some up (with a little less sugar than called for) and let the kids have the kool-aid experience. Margo just asked for some "yarn juice" this morning, too funny. My mom used to buy kool-aid when we went camping, the grape smell was really reminding me of camping, so I'll have to keep up the tradition.
I also bought a used double jogging stroller off Craig's List this weekend. I decided that the reason I wasn't walking as much as I used to was because of my gigantic 45 pound 4 year old and obvious stroller maneuvering difficulties because of said gigantic 4 year old. I was right. I have put at least 10 miles on the stroller since purchased on Tuesday. Okay, so gigantic four year old barely fits into the thing but he's comfortable and wants to ride in it and if I only get a year out of it before putting it back on Craig's List it will be worth it.
All in all we had a very nice week and now I have a head cold and feel miserable and desperately need to clean my filthy house... hmmm....
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