Kool-Aid and Food Coloring

I finished my 4^th square for a project one of the Sunday knitters has going. She got the JK kids at her daughters’ school to do some Kool-Aid dyeing, with the idea to felt knitted squares of this yarn and make it into pads for the kids to sit on. They are to go into the school library, which is getting revamped this summer, and each grade is contributing something. There was supposed to be a knitting machine involved, but when that fell through she recruited us. Well, garter stitch rectangles are sufficiently mindless to qualify us as machines, I suppose.

I haven’t done any kool-aid dyeing myself, but I spent one afternoon last week doing a little dyeing with food coloring at a neighbor’s. She had a special project on the go, to celebrate her black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and I was playing with some roving bought last fall. Because of the tendency of food coloring dyes to ‘break’ or separate, it is a bit of an art. So my roving doesn’t look quite how I envisioned, but it’s pretty, and not felted, which is the other big worry with roving, depending on how you treat it and set the colors.

Seeing as how the batches ended up a little different, I suspect they will get spun separately and plied together, to maximize uniformity while keeping the color variegation.