Becker Brigade Hats

Earlier this month I posted about my sons dyeing yarn with Kool Aid and food coloring using the sunshine and heat for solar energy. I told them when they picked out their colors that I would knit them hats. I just finished today!

Name: Becker Brigade Hats

Pattern: Slip Stitch Stash Hat by Renee Rico

Yarn: Knit Picks Bare Peruvian Highland Wool

Weight: Worsted

Modifications: See my Ravelry page for more info.

More Kool Aid Popsicle Dyeing

Remember my tutorial from last summer? Yesterday, my two sons did some more dyeing using this method. They chose their colors, helped make the ice cubes. They arranged their popsicles on the yarn and waited not so patiently for the sun to dye it. I told them I would use their yarn to knit them new winter hats.

NOTE: This technique will NOT work on cotton. Kool Aid and food coloring will only successfully dye on wool, silk and other animal fibers/hairs.

My son Bailey chose McCormick yellow food coloring, Kool Aid Mixed Berry, Kool Aid Cherry and Kool Aid Black Cherry for his yarn colors.

My son Silas chose McCormick green food coloring, Kool Aid Lemon Lime, Kool Aid Mixed Berry and Kool Aid Peach Mango for his yarn.

Here are some things that I did differently from last time.

• As soon as my boys were done arranging their ice cubes on the yarn, I covered the glass dish with saran wrap. I didn't wait like last time.
• We did this in the morning when it was 68 degrees out. We laid the covered yarn in the shade. After a couple of hours (we ran errands) we came home and saw that the ice cubes were all melted but the yarn was still in the shade and still relatively cool.
• Once I saw that the dye was all melted, I peeled back the saran wrap and gently flipped the  yarn over. A lot of the dye was on the bottom and now it's on the top and will slowly drip its way through the rest of the yarn.
• I recovered the yarn and put it in direct sunlight (It got up to the high 80s in the afternoon.) We went to the park after this for a few hours. When we got back, the saran wrap was all steamy and the glass was hot to touch! I brought it inside and pulled the yarn out. It was really hot too. Perfect! The water dripping off the yarn was clear, all the dye was absorbed into the yarn.

Including shade and sunlight time, the yarn was outside for about 6 hours. I thought by letting the ice cubes melt in the shade, it would melt slower. Giving it a less spotty, polka dot look. I also think turning the yarn over was a good idea. Their yarn is more uniform. Yay success!  Feel free to ask me any questions below.

UPDATE!! See the hats that I knit for them on this post here.

Kool Aid Yarn Dyeing 101

I've done yarn dyeing tutorials in the past like my gradient slow cooker method or my ice cube solar dyeing experiment. But I often get asked how do you dye yarn with just Kool Aid? Just a simple dye? I'm doing this for a current knitting project and thought I'd document it so you can see. And I'll be doing it on my stove top. Kool Aid Yarn Dyeing 101. Also you can use this same method to dye with food coloring. I'll post the slight technique differences in blue.

What you need:
-Yarn. All wool to mostly wool. Rather, mostly an animal fiber (wool, silk, hair...). Now your yarn can be a blend like 80% wool, 20% nylon. It just won't dye as vibrant. But the more wool/animal fiber content it has, the better. Cotton and acrylics will not dye! Don't even try it.
-Kool Aid or food coloring. Generally, you want one packet of Kool Aid per ounce of fiber. You can do more for a super bright, intense color or less for a softer, pastel shade. You want straight Kool Aid, not a mix with added sugar or sweetener (yuck! Sticky yarn!) VERY IMPORTANT: YOU DO NOT ADD SUGAR TO THIS. YOU JUST USE THE KOOL AID POWDER STRAIGHT FROM THE PACKET. With food coloring, I have no advice. You just play around until you find the right amount of dye for the shade you're looking for. You can use liquid food coloring or gel. Both work great! Make sure you're buying coloring and not colored flavored icing (with sugar).
-White vinegar if dyeing with food coloring.
-Gloves. Pretty much the most important thing here. Cheap rubber or latex gloves to prevent your fingers and hands being stained by Kool Aid.
-Tiny amount of acrylic yarn for tying off skein.
-A large bowl or sink. To soak yarn, to rinse yarn.
-A large stock pot to heat dye and yarn.
-A large plastic spoon to stir.
-Stove top burner.

A side note: Since Kool Aid and food coloring are non-toxic you can use your everyday kitchen supplies to do this. No need to buy "dye only" spoons, bowls and pots. Just wash them when you're done and they'll be fine.

Step One:
So where do you get this dyeable yarn from anyway? I usually buy it online from Knit Picks. You can also find natural (undyed yarn) in craft stores and local yarn shops. Cascade 220 and Patons Classic Wool are great. You don't need white/natural yarn. If you dye over a tan, grey or any light color your dye result will look more jeweled tone instead of primary bright, bright, BRIGHT! Check this out to see what I mean.

Today I'm dyeing Knit Picks Bare Peruvian Highland Wool in Worsted Weight. It's 200 yards/100 grams. 100 grams is about 3.5 ounces. So I'd need 3-4 packets of Kool Aid for a true color. I'm going with 3 for this dye job.

The yarn comes in a skein with two ends tied up. We want to add more two more ties on the other end. This  will prevent tangling and make it much easier for us to handle after we've dyed it. I've used a small amount of red acrylic yarn and tied a loose figure 8 in the skein. You don't want it too tight or dye won't get under the ties. It doesn't matter what color, but acrylic yarn is great because the color doesn't bleed off (meaning, there won't be any red dye in my yarn.)

Step Two:
Fill your sink or large bowl with lukewarm water. Gently place yarn into the water and carefully press down and squeeze it. Try to get as much water into the yarn so it stops floating to the top. You're soaking the yarn so that when you dye it, the color absorbs more evenly.

Now if you're dyeing with food coloring, add a glug of white vinegar to this water soak before you add the yarn. Kool Aid has citric acid in it, which helps bond the dye to the yarn. Food coloring doesn't have it so adding a bit of vinegar will do the trick. Let the yarn sit in the water for 15-30 minutes. While this is happening, move to the next step.

Step Three (the fun part):
Get your gloves, Kool Aid and large plastic spoon ready. For today's dye job I'm using three packets of Lemon Lime Kool Aid.

Fill your large pot with water and heat it up on your stove. Dyeing with food coloring? Add another glug of white vinegar this pot of water. You want the water to be hot and steamy but without any boiling or simmering nonsense. I usually bring it up to temperature on medium heat and then take it down to low when it's nice and hot. 

Put on your gloves (except I forgot. HA!) and pour your Kool Aid packets into the pot of hot water. Stir it with your plastic spoon until it's all dissolved. Food coloring dyers, you can squirt, drop and scoop your dye right into the the hot water and stir until dissolved. Not sure how much to add? Start light and you can always add more color later.

Now drain the water out of your yarn bath and gently squeeze the excess water out of your yarn. It doesn't have to be mostly dry, just get enough water out that it's not slopping around. Gently place the yarn into your pot of dye water. Use the plastic spoon to push the yarn down getting it completely submerged. Swirl it around, turn it over, loosen it up. Just be gentle so you don't accidently felt it. Add more hot water if you need. There should be plenty of room for the yarn to move around and be in water entirely. When dyeing, it's not the amount of water that is a concern, but rather the amount of dye.

How do you know when it's done dyeing? When it's the color you want or when it does this really cool, magical thing. All the dye that is in the water, goes into the yarn. So you'll know when it's done because the water is clear! Some Kool Aid flavors like lemonade will turn the water chalky white and not clear when it's done. But you're looking for the lack of color in the water to clue you in. Super cool right? This is why it's important to calculate the yarn to dye ratio rather than the yarn to water ratio.


Here's a photo of the yarn right when I put it in the bath. Notice the water? Super green!

This photo shows the yarn in the dye bath for a few minutes. Still some dye but much clearer!

And this is the pot of water after I've taken my dyed yarn out. No dye!

So when you're dyeing your yarn, stir it every couple of minutes to make sure it doesn't settle to the bottom (to prevent scorching) and to make sure all the fibers are getting dyed. When it's to the color that you want, or all the dye has been absorbed into the yarn (it took less than 10 minutes for this to happen), bring your large bowl over and use the spoon to carefully pull yarn out of pot and into the bowl. Let the yarn hang out in the bowl until it's room temperature. You may have gently flip or spread out the yarn occasionally to help the cooling process. Don't rush it! Be patient. We don't want to felt our yarn!

A side note: If it's not a deep enough color for you but the dye water is clear, pull the yarn out and put it in the bowl. Add more Kool Aid or food coloring and stir to dissolve. Add the yarn and repeat until color is achieved.

Step Four:
Woohoo! Dyed yarn! Once it's nice and cooled down, pull it out of your bowl or sink and put it somewhere for a second (dish rack? towel? plate?). Also, you'll notice how helpful adding extra ties to your yarn was. See how easy it was to untangle? Fill the bowl or sink with lukewarm water and put the yarn back in it. Swish it around. You're cleaning/rinsing the yarn. If any color comes off into this new water then STOP! Grab the yarn and put it back into the hot water in the pot and cook for a few minutes more- add another glug of white vinegar if using food coloring. If your water is clear, drain and squeeze the water out of yarn as best you can and hang to dry (nevermind my hula hoops). Here's my dyed yarn in it's rinsing bath. Water is clear! No run-off dye.

When it's completely dry, wind it into a ball and start knitting! Viola!! You did it! Now wasn't that easy?? Have you sniffed your yarn yet? Smells like candy! 

Experiment with mixing colors. Dye one half of the skein one color, then dye the other half a second color. Look around. Be inspired by colors in your life! Dye and knit ALL THE THINGS! The Kool Aid dye is permanent. It won't wash off. Treat it like you would any other wool. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.

Kool Aid Popsicle Dyeing

I came across a DIY post on Tumblr that showed how you can freeze watercolor paints in ice cube trays and then use the frozen paints to "draw" on fabric or paper. I instantly thought I could do that with Kool Aid and yarn! I just had to wait for my Oregon "summer" to cooperate. I needed it to get sunny and warm enough to melt the ice cubes.

NOTE: This technique will NOT work on cotton. Kool Aid and food coloring will only dye wool, silk or other animal fiber/hair.

Remember to wear your gloves! I took one packet of Kool Aid and mixed it with just enough water to fill 3 ice cube sections (do not add sugar! Just KA and water.) Then I froze them.

I used:

Kool Aid grape

Kool Aid strawberry

Klass brand pineapple

Klass brand hibiscus

Klass is a Mexican version of Kool Aid that I picked up at a Latino grocery store.

I soaked my WOOL yarn in warm water and vinegar for about a half an hour. I gently squeezed out the water and then laid it into a glass 9x13 baking pan. I put the frozen dye cubes on top and set it outside in direct sunlight.

When I first put the dye cubes on the yarn.

After an hour in the sun.

Once it was completely melted- in my case about an hour and a half- I covered it with saran wrap to help raise the heat and incubate the yarn. In hindsight, I could have just covered it when I first put it outside to melt. You need the yarn to reach about 180 degrees Fahrenheit (really, you just need it to be HOT!) to set the dye in the yarn. You could also cook the yarn in your oven or microwave it for a few minutes but I wanted this to be a solar project. So I covered it and left it outside all day.

Yarn steaming in the sun.

You'll know it's done when your baking dish is hot and the liquid in the yarn is clear- that means that the yarn has absorbed all of the dye. Bring yarn inside and let it cool down to room temperature. I then gently washed the yarn in warm water with some Eucalan (again there should be no dye washing off- your yarn bath should be clear. If it is running color, stop washing immediately and put back outside to cook some more. Or wrap it in saran wrap and nuke it in the microwave for a few minutes.) Gently squeeze the water out and then allowed it to air dry.

I'd say this was a total success!

Name: Summer Popsicle

Yarn: Knit Picks Bare Peruvian Highland Wool

Weight: Bulky

Yards: 137 yards

Update! See more Kool Aid Popsicle yarn that I dyed with notes and tips on this post.

Recycled Sweater Project Part 2

... lots of yarn, still just the one sweater.

I recently posted about using a used thrift store sweater to make yarn for yourself- Recycled, Upcycled Sweater. I had knit my son Bailey a sweater after taking apart the used sweater, dyeing it and reknit. His sweater took only the yarn from the front and back of the sweater and I still had enough leftover to make myself some leg warmers.

I took the sleeves off of the original sweater and set them aside for another project. A project I call Friendship Bonnets made for two awesome little girls Molly and Lydia. Instead of unraveling the yarn from the sleeves, I left whole. After hand washing them and soaking them in vinegar water I placed them on a layer of cling wrap. I mixed my food coloring with more vinegar water and used a squirt bottle to squirt stripes onto the sleeves. I used Wiltons black, red and royal blue. After I applied the dye, I added another sheet of cling wrap, rolled it up and microwaved it until the color was all absorbed. I then layed it out to dry.

The great thing about leaving the sleeves whole is when it was time to knit, I could just unravel the sleeve as I went. I didn't have to wind it into a skein or ball. You can buy something similar called a sock blank- a preknitted sheet of wool that you can dye then simply unravel to knit socks.

Each sleeve made one bonnet with no leftover yarn. The pattern is something I came up with on the spot.

There's a phenomenon that occurs (sometimes) with food coloring. It breaks. That means that all the colors that are in the dye separate. The black broke into a brown and green and the royal blue broke into blue, purple and a bit of pink. I think it looks great!

So with one $4.99 thrift store sweater, I was able to make one sweater, two hats and a pair of legwarmers! That's really cool.

Name: Friendship Bonnets

Yarn: recycled, upcycled thrift store sweater yarn

Weight: super bulky

Pattern: my own

Recycled, Upcycled Sweater

...lots of yarn for very little!

If you're like me and buy yarn as if sheep were going extinct, you know that your yarn bill adds up. Very quickly. A great way to get a lot of yarn is by going to the thrift store! While some thrift shops do sell yarn that people have donated, I'm talking about buying a sweater, taking it apart and reusing the yarn for your project! It's cheap. It's awesome. It's a load of fun! Lemme break it down.

In my case here, I knew I wanted yarn I would be able to dye with food coloring. To dye with food coloring or Kool Aid, you have to have it made out of wool of some sort. The higher the wool content the better. Cotton and man made fibers like acrylic do not take dyes very well (I should clarify- cotton does not take food dyes very well.) This sweater here I bought for $4.99 and is 50% wool, 50% acrylic.

The second thing you want to look at in a possible sweater are the seams. Go ahead and turn it inside out. What do you see? If the seams are sewn together like this, then you're golden! That means each piece was knitted then put together with a chain stitch.

However, if you find a sweater that was sewn together with a serger skip it! A serger cuts the yarn while it sews it together. That means that instead of having one long continuous piece of yarn you're unraveling, each row of knitting will be it's own separate string. You'd end up with hundreds of yard long pieces of yarn. Not very useful for knitting.

So now you have to wash your sweater. I hand wash them with some wool wash. You can wash it as it is- in one big piece before you've taken it apart. You can take the sweater apart, wash those separately or you can do what I like to do. After I've taken it apart, unraveled it and skeined it I wash it just prior to dyeing. When you dye yarn, you want the yarn wet. So washing it right before makes sense to me.

Taking the sweater apart is fun but can also be time consuming. I like using a seam ripper. If you look at the chain stitch that sewed the sweater together, you'll notice that it looks like a bunch of arrows on top of each other. If you cut the thread at the top of the arrows, you'll be able to just pull it and it'll unravel the entire seam (think of it like dog or cat food- some bags have that same sort of chain stitch closure when you first buy it.) If you can get that chain stitch undone, it'll save you lots of time!

With this sweater, I am planning on using the sleeves for a different project so I put them aside and just started unraveling the front and back pieces. You can wind it into a ball, wind it onto a niddy noddy (which I do) or wind it around anything else- back of a chair?

My four year old son wanted a blue sweater, so I knew I'd be dyeing this yarn. I had him pick out the colors. He chose Wilton's teal, royal blue and kelly green food coloring. I used the pan method and heated it in the microwave. After I skeined and tied my yarn (to prevent tangles!) I washed it and then soaked it in vinegar water. I gently squeezed out the water and layed it in my casserole dish. I dissolved each food dye into some vinegar water and poured it on top.

Left to right: royal blue, kelly green, teal.

I then microwaved it a few minutes at a time until the water was clear. I pulled out the yarn, let it cool then squeezed out the water and let it dry. I did this will all the skeins of yarn I would be using.

I found this great pattern for a top down, seamless raglan sweater. Fits anybody, any size with any yarn. You knit a swatch, plug in your numbers, do the math and now you have a sweater pattern! It worked great! After I finished knitting Bailey's sweater, I still had enough of the yarn to knit myself leg warmers. And don't forget I still have those two sleeves! All that yarn. For less than $5! Such a deal!

Name: Bailey Blue Sweater

Yarn: recycled, upcycled thrift store sweater yarn

Weight: super bulky

Pattern: The Magic Custom Fit Raglan Sweater by At My Mothers Knee

Another great lesson on recycling sweaters by Lee Meredith.