{"id":4834,"date":"2012-10-08T16:47:25","date_gmt":"2012-10-08T21:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/?p=4834"},"modified":"2012-10-08T16:47:25","modified_gmt":"2012-10-08T21:47:25","slug":"gradient-yarn-w-koolaid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/08\/gradient-yarn-w-koolaid\/","title":{"rendered":"Gradient Yarn with Kool-Aid"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last month, I got the urge to dye yarn. I didn’t have any bare skeins hanging around, but I did remember I had pieces of a white wool sweater in my closet. Waaay back in 2010, I thrifted a large white wool sweater. It had the perfect seams to unraveling, so I took it apart almost immediately. …Then we bought a house and moved. It got trapped in a box of random crafty shit and I just forgot about it for a year. Last year, I dyed one of the sleeves<\/a> and then last month I finally dyed the other.<\/p>\n

I like sleeve dyeing because it makes me feel like I have more control over where the dye goes. Last year, I used these<\/a> directions from craftystylish, but this time I wanted to try something different. <\/p>\n

I wanted a gradient\/ombre look, so I thought about how people get that with shirts by putting small parts of the fabric in at a time. Would it work? YES! I probably made it a little more difficult than it needed to be, but I was working with what I had–2 packs of pineapple Kool-Aid and 1 pack of cherry. <\/p>\n

I started by putting my sleeve in a bowl of water with a splash of vinegar. I made sure it was completely saturated, then I put it in the microwave for a minute to temper it. While it was heating up, I mixed the 2 packs of pineapple with 1 cup of vinegar and 1 cup of water and put it in a pot to heat up. I pulled my bowl out of the microwave and lifted the sleeve out (over the bowl, because it was dripping), gently squeezing a bit of the excess water out. I was able to handle it with my bare hands, but use caution if it feels too hot to you. <\/p>\n

I started by dipping about 6-8 inches, counting to ten and dipping another 6 inches. I could see a lot of the dye getting absorbed pretty quickly and by the time I got to the last bit, there was hardly any yellow coming off my liquid. I quickly mixed the pack of cherry and 2 cups of water and then lifted my sleeve over the pot, mixed in the cherry and started dipping again. by the time I got to the top, the water was pink. Yay! <\/p>\n

I let it sit in the warming water for a few quick minutes (no boiling!) and then I rinsed it with hot water, slowly getting the temperature down. When I could handle it, I put a dash of baby shampoo in to get any excess dye out. After it was done, I rolled it up in a towel and squeezed out most of the water, then let it hang in front of a fan for a few hours. Once dry, I went about the arduous task of unraveling and getting this yarn into a skein, which entailed ANOTHER bath (once unraveled). It was all worth it, as it looked so pretty wound into a ball.<\/p>\n

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I had various shades of coral and pink throughout. I was afraid the mix would be too orange, but it came out so lovely!<\/p>\n

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It took another week or two for me to finally knit something out of it, but here it is! A basic knit hat. The yarn was pretty chunky, so I was able to make a 60-st hat in a day.<\/p>\n

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It was big enough for me to tuck my hair into. <\/p>\n

Do you like to dye your own yarn? Have you ever tried dyeing a sweater sleeve then re-purposing the yarn into something else? I’ve dyed with Kool-Aid<\/a> before, but this is the first time I’ve actually tried to get the colors to look a certain way.<\/p>\nPin It<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Last month, I got the urge to dye yarn. I didn’t have any bare skeins hanging around, but I did remember I had pieces of a white wool sweater in my closet. Waaay back in 2010, I thrifted a large white wool sweater. It had the perfect seams to unraveling, so I took it apart almost immediately. …Then we bought a house and moved. It got trapped [Read More…]<\/p>\nPin It<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,42,115,4],"tags":[227,194,33],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4834"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4847,"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834\/revisions\/4847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/goodknits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}