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madmaudlingoes · 2 years

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How to Dye Wool with Kool Aid

I live tweeted this a while ago, but since Twitter is now on life support, and in the spirit of making crafts more accessible, here are my adventures in Kool Aid Dyeing.

WTF Kool Aid?

Yep! The powdered drink mix (without any sugar) functions as an acid dye -- the citric acid flavoring binds the pigment to the fiber. This can dye any protein based fiber (eg wool, silk, alpaca, cashmere) but won’t work on cellulose (eg cotton, linen, Tencel) or synthetics. If you have a wool blend, which a lot of sock yarn is, the synthetic portion may get hidden by the dyed wool -- or you may get a cool stripey effect from the mix of dyed/undyed fibers.

No really, why Kool Aid?

I mean, any powdered drink mix could work here -- the point is that it’s very cheap, easily accessible, and food safe. That last bit matters because if your dye isn’t food safe, you have to acquire pots/cups/pyrex that is Only For Dye if you don’t wanna get poisoned. So this is an accessible way to try dyeing your own materials with minimal upfront costs.

Adding a cut bc this gets image heavy.

[image ID: four clear plastic jars with yellow screw-on lids. In front of them are several packets of Kool-Aid.]

Here are my supplies: packets of Kool Aid in Mixed Berry, Grape, and Sharkleberry Finn. What's a sharkleberry? Do not ask, friend. Do not ask.

The jars in the background are breast milk containers because they have volume markings and I have a lot laying around. Measuring cups and old jars or Tupperware would work just as well.

[image ID: four jars of brightly colored liquids, with the torn-off tops of Kool-Aid packets to identify the colors. Mixed Berry is dark blue, Grape is almost black, and Sharkleberry Fin is a salmon pink.]

Here's what my "stock solutions" look like, dissolved in four oz of tap water. The color you get is based on the ratio of powder to fiber, and I'm aiming for 1 packet per ounce of wool. Dissolving it like this just lets me mix colors without going off that ratio or messing around with partial packets.

[image ID: on a stovetop, two hanks of white yarn each sit in a clear Pyrex bowl of water. Next to each bowl is a clear plastic jar with some amount of Kool-Aid mix in it. The jar on the left is very dark blue; the jar on the right is muted purple.)

(Please ignore my gross stove.)

While i was mixing the kool aid, my fiber was soaking to get it really, really wet, which helps to get an even color. The jars next to each bowl are my mixed colors - 1:1 blue to purple on the left, and 1:3 blue to pink on the right. I've got another bowl that's going to be just blue.

[image ID:three Pyrex bowls of yarn and dye arranged on a stove top. Two of the bowls are full of blue dye and one is full of purple dye.]

Here is what the bowls of dye look like when it's first added. I'm using microwave safe containers (pyrex) because besides the acid, this method also requires heat - courtesy of my microwave, which is not pictured because it's even grosser than the stove. I take turns zapping each bowl for two minutes at a time, checking in between to see whether the dye has exhausted.

[image ID: purple yarn in a Pyrex bowl full of water. The water is slightly milky but contains no trace of purple.]

This is what I mean by "exhausted". All the color has been absorbed by the yarn, and the water that was purple now looks milky/clear. If you use too much dye (=too many packets of Kool Aid at once) the bath will never exhaust. The blues took longer than the purple to exhaust, but they all were done after about 5-7 microwave rides.

[image ID: a Pyrex bowl of blue yarn sitting in water. The water is still faintly blue, but far less so than it started out.]

Here's the almost exhausted blue mix. Notice how the cotton twine I used to tie up my hanks is still white? I let this one cool with a bit of color still in the water just because I didn't want to boil it (that gets you felt).

[image ID: three hanks of yarn arranged in a metal colander. The one on the right appears vivid turquoise; the one on the left is a more muted teal; the one in the middle is a dull pinkish purple.]

Once they cooled, I transferred the yarns to a colander to rinse out any kool-aid residue and drip dry. At this point, my kitchen smelled like hot kool-aid, or possibly hair-flavored Twizzlers.

[image ID: three hanks of yarn hanging from hooks on a towel rack. They are turquoise, teal, and purple from left to right.]

Here's what the dried hanks look like hanging up in my bathroom. The one in the middle was the blue-purple mix, while the one on the left was a whole packet of blue on .7 ounces of yarn, so slight more saturated. The purple doesn't photograph well, especially next to the other two, but it’s a muted violet-gray shade.

So that's kool aid dying! You can use this to dye white yarn or fabric, or to overdye other colors. This page from the Wayback Machine gives a lot of good tips on how to combine colors, though some of the flavors are out of date. (No sharkleberry, for instance.)

#crafts #dyeing #kool aid dye #fiber arts

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