Adventures in Overdyeing

I've had the Tangled Garden sock pattern from Knitty printed out for a couple of weeks. The pattern calls for buying white sock yarn and dyeing with Kool-Aid. My stash included several partial balls of variegated and printed sock yarn so I decided to use those.

To dye I first skeined all the yarn then soaked it in hot water with a generous splash of vinegar. In a pot I combined hot water, Wilton's Christmas Red Paste Food Coloring (50 cents in the clearance aisle at Walmart) plus a packet of Black Cherry Kool-Aid. I also added some salt and vinegar. I simmered the yarn for a few minutes until the dye exhausted and let it sit until it was cool enough to handle. I rinsed and hung it out to dry.



The tangled mess above is a sample of the BEFORE yarn. The ball next to it is the AFTER version. All the yarns had white as a major component but varied in color and fiber content. My resulting balls are all different but I think similar enough to make some interestingly eclectic socks. I'm combining them with an olive green gleaned from the sale bin of a LYS.



I like the contrast I'm getting so far. Alas, along with knitting backward, my other knitting foible is that I knit very L-0-0-S-E-L-Y. The pattern specifies a gauge of 9 st/in. on size US 1 needles. I'm using US 0 needles and have gotten 7 st/in. I don't have a set of DPNs that are smaller so I guess I'll be doing some significant reworking of the pattern's 24 stitch repeat. But then I just hate blindly following instructions, don't you?

AND the cat has been redeemed. My purse is a Vera Bradley knockoff that went through the washing machine just fine. I did let poor Murder back in the house. Good thing because the tail end of Hurricane Frances is still dumping rain on us.