I can’t believe I drank that as a kid

So now that I have made quite a few things for child #2, #1 is getting a bit impatient for me to make something for her (and rightfully so in my opinion).  I have therefore agreed with her that I would made her a sweater or cardi, but since she like all 6 yo children has the attention span of a fruit fly at times, I tried to find someway to include her in the project.  I had ordered some raw white wool that I intended to dye, but then I stumbled upon this article which outlines how to dye yarn with food color as a child friendly project.  While I am not big on the colors that can be made with food color or kool-aid, I thought the garish results would be perfect for a barbie/bratz/disney pricess obsessed little girl. 

The first thing we did was order a variety of colors from Koolaid World (yes, there exists such a thing). Once they came, we decided that Strawberry and Lemon/Lime along with darkly brewed coffee would be our dyes of choice.  Saturday, we (my sister-in-law, #1 and myself) got started:

First we soaked the wool in a tub outside.  While that was going on, #1 closely observed the coffee machine to make sure the coffee was dark enough:(is a watched coffee pot like a watched kettle?)

We then mixed up the kool aid:

And #1 learned not to taste unsweetened kool aid:

So after looking at the colors of our very black coffee and the neon green lime and toxic red strawberry kool aid against the white wool, I got a little worried.  I was a bit afraid that it would end up a little too bright, but we decided to go for it anyway and prepared all of the beverages with vinegar acid. 

The results after being microwaved, washed and dried are as follows:

I intentionally left a large color variation between skeins so that we would get a striped effect in the sweater between brighter and lighter variations of the same colors.  Two of the brighter skeins are divided up in thirds color wise while the other two are in fourths (coffee, lime, coffee, strawberry). I am pleasantly surprised with the end result - #1 is very pleased and the colors ended up being muted enough that I am sure she won’t get tired of them 5 minutes after I cast off. :-)

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