KoolAid dyeing with yarn

Kristi Porter wrote a good tutorial on dyeing yarn with KoolAid at knitty.com. I had seen a lot of this in my blog travels and thought it would be fun to try with my kids. It was tons of fun but it really got me wondering about the KoolAid, which in my hands behaved like some kind of industrial grade dye. So, obviously not the best stuff to be drinking.

The yarn below (top left) is a single-ply silk yarn that I love. It's very fine, much like a heavy weight thread. I painted a small skein of it to see how it would turn out. The colours are not as bright on the silk as they are on a wool yarn, but I quite like the results.

Here (bottom left) is a photo of the rolled silk yarn after it had been rinsed and dried. Above right is a small swatch (~2 x 6 inches) that I knitted up with it. I quite like the movement of colour from side to side across the swatch. I think this happened because the length of the individual colours painted onto the yarn was approximately the length needed to knit across one row of the swatch. The colours seem to shift a bit with each row so the end result is that several waves of colour seem to migrate back and forth across the swatch. Is this what's called pooling? Because I like it.

Flavours used:

• The orange is orange
  
• The green is lemon-lime
• The blue is ice blue rasberry lemonade
  
• The purple is grape

Here are the same colours painted onto wool:



Here are the same colours on wool with a blast of tropical punch added to the mix:



Additional links:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=koolaid+dye
http://www.ipomoea.org/emma/kadye/kadye.html
http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/FAQ/drinkmix.shtml
http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/fooddyes.shtml
http://www.thepiper.com/fiberart/koolaid/images/colorchart-max.jpg