Koolaid dyeing sock yarn!!

Last fall I tried my hand at dyeing some yarn with koolaid to make a felted pumpkin.  Well, I decided that now I wanted to try my hand at dyeing some sock yarn with koolaid!  So my sister-in-law and I ordered our yarn from Knit Picks and away we went!  I referenced this and this to try to figure out how to make self-striping yarn.  We'll see how it all turns out.   (**Warning!  There's a lot of pictures in this post...if only I knew how to do a collage of them...continue if you want...)

First we measured two chairs about 16 feet apart and then started winding our yarn around them.

Then I tied off the yarn every 12" and 18".  This is what the bundle looked like afterward.  

Then we picked out our colors.  I used cherry, strawberry, and pink lemonade.  I want crazy pink and red socks!

Molly picked berry blue, ice blue raspberry, orange, lemon lime, and lemonade.  She's making her socks for my brother.  Then we set to work.  There's two ways you can dye the yarn, in the microwave and on the stove.  We found out that using the stove was MUCH faster.  Molly finished her yarn WAY faster than I did.  All you have to do is put a little water in a pot, add your koolaid, and then wait for the water to boil.  Once it it boiling, you turn off the stove and cover your yarn until the water is clear (which really didn't take a long time at all for our small quantities of yarn). 

After we had dyed all of it, we stretched it back out in the backyard so that it could dry.  

After dyeing mine I realized that there wasn't enough of a difference between the cherry and strawberry.  I was hoping that strawberry would be a bright pink...but really it was just red.  So the next day I bought some black cherry and over dyed the "cherry" sections of my yarn.  Now I have a deep dark red, a bright red, and a pink!   

After our yarn was dry, it was time to wind it up into a ball.  I thought this wouldn't be hard at all since we had already wound it around the chairs.  I figured we'd just take off the green yarn (that we used to mark off our different sections) and then just wind the yarn up.  Nope.  Not that easy.  There were so many different tangles in the yarn!  Molly's especially.  It was hard work untangling all the yarn.  

The finished product!  I love it!  I decided to call it "Bittersweet Cherry."  It makes me salivate just looking at it.  Even though it was more work than I thought it would be, I would totally dye yarn this way again!  I can't wait to knit it up into something.