New Addiction - Kool Aid and Sock Blanks

As if I needed another facet of knitting to become hooked on. I've now been introduced to 1) dyeing my own yarn with Kool Aid and 2) dyeing sock blanks from Knit Picks. Oh My Gosh - it is FUN!!!! There are even two Ravelry groups for just these two concepts "Sock Blank Artists" and "A Kool Way to Dye". Of course I now belong to both and have learned a lot from reading about everyone else's successes and failures; however the first thing I did was read this tutorial on Knitty.com - it is a terrific step-by-step guide and I followed it to a "T".

After doing all my research my girl and I decided to try our first attempt at Kool Aid dyeing together. Well, it was supposed to be together, but after I organized everything and was ready to go she promptly took over and I didn't get to do anything.

She soaked the sock blank.

She opened Kool Aid packets (in this case a Wyler's fruit punch).

She poured them into the water, stirred it up and after I poured the "dye" into a squirt bottle away she went...
Squirting furiously, a mini Jackson Pollack if you will. Just look at the concentration - she's very focused at the task at hand.

Unfortunately, the subtleties of hand-dyeing were lost on her. She tended to want to just empty out the entire 8 oz bottle in one place until I reminded her "no, no, move the bottle around!"

So, the end result is a little bit odd looking - on the up side it looks rather Christmasy (her color choices were fruit punch, black cherry and lemon-lime). On the down side it looks like we mopped up a bloody nose or something. However, my friends on Ravelry all assure me that what you SEE in the sock blank is not necessarily what you GET when you knit up the blank and make socks. Most times you are happily surprised when you finish knitting and end up with a lovely pair of socks no matter how much they looked like a bloody rag when you started knitting.
As a little memento of our mother/daughter venture into sock blank dyeing I think I'm going to knit up a pair of socks for each of us with the yarn.