I Left My Cake Out In The Rain

After the Kool-Aid dying, I tried my hand at dying with icing dyes. This is another food safe practice. i.e You can use normal kitchen utensils etc and do not have to take any special precautions. The one difference between using food colourings and Kool-Aid is that you have to add acid; Kool-Aid contains citric acid.

This was the yarn I used.



Also 100% wool like the last time but this is marked as Peruvian wool and has more loft. In other words the yarn has a slight fuzz.

I bought a box of 4 colours labeled Pastel:- soft colours for soft yarn.



I used 1/8 teaspoon of each colour, dissolved in hot water. The extra step when using food colours is soaking in acid. The tutorials I found differed in the amount of time for soaking from as little as 20 minutes to as much as overnight. I think I ended up soaking the yarn (after winding into a hank) for a couple of hours. I used a 1 to 4 solution of white vinegar and water.

I had wound the yarn into a small hank, squeezed out most of the water and added the dyes. Here is a drawing to try to show how I added the colours. Basically I had the blue and green on the long sides with the hank roughly divided into two and the pink and orange on the short sides again with the hank divided in two. Think of the division as top and bottom.



The yarn was put into a casserole dish and some water added so that the dyes would spread.



This was placed in the microwave and heated for 2 minutes at a time with 2 minute breaks in between.This needed more "zaps" than the Kool-Aid and when it seemed very hot I left it for 5 minutes before reheating. Once all the dye had been taken up I left the yarn to cool before rinsing and hanging to dry.

This is how it turned out.





Although this is not the pastel, Easter shades I was envisioning when I bought the dye. This yarn is full of different colours and more interesting than my initial plan. I have tried to show all the colours in this photo although it is hard to get a close-up.



And the finished skein.