Looky what I did!

Playing catch-up here. This post has been unfinished since June 14th. The day after I was off to Winnipeg for the weekend and I haven't done much since. I have so much to tell and will try and blog everyday until I am caught up. Yet to come: yarn candy from Winnipeg and summer of socks progress.

I dyed the little yarn cake. I used Wilton icing colour, Delphinium Blue. I have done a lot of reading on dying and thought using something I already had in my cupboard was a good place to start. What is so cool about this is the dye colour split into different shades [as was discussed on the email group dyehappy] .

So I looked for how to do it. I don't know why I didn't think to just ask the email group but the result probably would have been just as confusing as what I found elsewhere on the web. Seems everyone has their own idea of how it should be done. Most recipes for Koolaid dying would contain references to Wiltons saying it is used the same or similar. So which is it? There is so much info out there on Koolaid dying, with conflicting procedures and methods I actually became overwhelmed and put off doing it because I couldn't decide what I should do. After a week of letting all that knowledge rattle around in my brain I just did it. I didn't bother following anyones recipe i just went with what had collected in my memory.


My process: Soak the yarn in a mixture of 1 cup water and 1/4 cup vinegar for an hour. I had discovered on some chat board that the difference between koolaid and wiltons is you need more vinegar with wiltons because koolaid has citric acid in it. Some dyers don't even bother adding any vinegar to koolaid. Some dyers cautioned using to much vinegar because it could damage the yarn and use as little as a tablespoon to a cup of water, others said that was rubbish and used as much as a 1:1 ratio of vinegar and water.

Use a toothpick to poke the Wiltons colouring into the wool in a few spots. I almost used to much colour. To encourage colour splitting using less is better.

I covered the cup with plastic wrap and microwaved the wool at 50% for 5 minutes. Raising the temperature of the wool slowly also helps with the splitting.

Let it set for 2 minutes. Microwave for another 5 minutes. Let set for 2 minutes. letting it rest helps prevent hotspots and scorching.

Continue to microwave and rest in 2 minute intervals until the water was clear.
I was soooo impressed when the water did clear. That's when I knew it was working!

And here she is, the one, the only, Little Cake: First Wool in Delphinium Blue!