Dying to try it.....

...or trying to dye it?

Well so went down to Ro's last weekend and did a spot of Kool Aid Dying. I'd seen undyed sock wool on special offer at Get Knitted so rather foolishly decided that I'd go for the 10x100g skeins, and while I was about it I'd score some Kool Aid from Kool Aid UK. The deed was done in no time at all on bank holiday Monday and so I just had to wait until I found a sucker with a microwave. Sorry that should be a "kind and willing accomplice".

I'd decided that I wanted to do a greeny bluey colour so I could use it to knit Pomatomus which I can't really imagine in any other colour. Ro decided on oranges and reds (mainly I suspect 'cos I'd already blagged the other colours.

I started off and had decided to do a random dye so just splashed it around over the skein as and where seemed appropriate. Quite quickly discovered that it worked better if it was more dilute; I'd started off with a sachet dissolved in a couple of tablespoons of water. We found that it didn't go far enough this way and that the dye could take being dissolved in a whole plastic cupful without being too dilute.

Ro did her skein in sections, starting with yellow at one end shading through orange in the middle to red at the far end. The red is Strawberry flavour and is the most amazingly saturated colour. God only knows what it does to the insides and brains of small children!!!!

Here are the skeins hanging up to dry after rinsing off. I say we rinsed them off but absolutely NO pigment came out of the wool in the rinse. (nor smell, the smell of the Kool Aid seems to be as persistent as the colour!).

I wasn't too thrilled with mine to start off with, seemed a bit wishy washy, but it's growing on me now, I've called the colour "Mermaid's Hair". Here it is wound into a ball along with the top of my first Pomatomus.

The needles I'm knitting it on are awful, the ends are so blunt it's really difficult to knit with them. I'm contemplating a trip over to Bradford to Texere to buy me some nice pointy bamboo needles in various sock suitable sizes. may take a look at their dye kits while I'm there, after all I've still got a bit of undyed sock wool left!!!!

Finally I'd like to introduce you to a new friend of mine. I met him a fortnight ago in a charity shop in Huddersfield and I really liked him. He had such a nice face I wanted to take him home with me, but I'm not really much of a soft toy kinda girl. If he'd been a Tiger it would have been a different matter, but he's not a Tiger so I regretfully left him in the shop.

Anyhoo, I felt bad about leaving him behind and later in the week it came to me that I COULD buy him and give him a home. You see I'd mistaken him for a Leopard, and he's not a Leopard at all, he must be a Cheetah. Well the fans of the other teams in the premiership don't call us the Leicester Tigers they call us the Leicester Cheetah's (only because we're better at cheating than they are, they're just jealous!) So last Friday i went back to Age Concern and he was still there waiting for me.
So here's Leo, at first I thought his name was Martin, but I must have mis-heard, he's definitely a Leo!

I'll post another picture of him when I've knitted him his rugby shirt.

Edited Sunday 21st
Here's a picture of the socks that Ro has knitted from her hand dyed yarn. It's called "Strawberry sunrise" cool no?