Seems like a good idea, but I floundered for inspiration for awhile until I saw someone's fabulous handknitted kneehigh socks on Ravelry. They had wonderful striping action, and I knew I wanted some for myself. Now, the socks I admired were from handspun yarn, but I wasn't going to have time to dye fleece and handspin the yarn for the socks.
So I compromised.
Knowing that 100g of sock yarn doesn't quite yield a pair of knee high socks (think mid-calf), I purchased 2-100g of undyed yarn from Knitpicks.com. Now, I could have dyed the fiber in the skein, but I wanted stripy rather than variegated yarn. So borrowing a friend's knitting machine (thank you Lindsey!) I turned each skein into matching sock blanks.
Now I had a canvas onto which I could paint kool-aid stripes.
Using Biscuits and Jam random strip generator, I selected my colors and stripe width and repeat parameters, printed out the result and had a guide for my stripe pattern.
The dyeing is pretty easy. Kool-aid is considered edible and non-toxic (depending on who you ask, right?), and pretty easy to use, with a minimum of prep. Knitty has an excellent tutorial on dyeing with Kool-Aid, complete with colors achieved from different flavors.
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| Mixing up the colors, two packets per color. |
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| Ready to dye, the two blanks laid out together. |
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| Wrapped in plastic, ready for microwave "steaming" to set the color. |
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| On display at the fair with other kool-aid projects. If you look closely you can see the beginning of a toe in the upper left. |
Best thing? The socks still smell like strawberry kool-aid.
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