A Hankering

Lately, I've had this crazy idea of learning to dye yarn (also, doing it so wonderfully that I start a business, get famous, go touring and have groupies. I'm nothing if not realistic.).

Of course the first step is learning how to actually do it, and since I didn't want to contaminate my house with chemicals (at least right away), I decided to beg my mom for koolaid. I've never seen koolaid in France. After using it as a permanant dye, I wonder why.

I also begged the internet to cough up some reasonably priced undyed yarn. That ships to the European continent. This took ages.

Finally, all the chips were in place and my hankering to dye hanks of yarn could finally be put into practice.

I took a hank of Australian Merino and placed it in the pot of water. I wanted a mostly blue but varigated cherry colorway. This is not what I got. It started out ok. Sorta:

And then the Cherry started encroaching on the blue and I was all, argh! More blue! More koolaid in the pot!

Despite adding more, I was forced to watch as the Cherry spread. Mocking my efforts with surprising ease.

This is when my son came into the kitchen, "What's for dinner?" He looked in the pot and recoiled. His body totally said WTF is that?

I could hardly blame him. It looked as though Hannibal Lector had been experimenting with various odds and ends in my kitchen:

Sigh.

With my second batch, I tried to just do a varigation of reds by holding half the skein out of the pot until the last minute but it still required a lot more packages of koolaid than I was bargaining for. And my colours aren't particularily deep (though they smell quite yummy).

I hereby give you the results of my labours: