dye job

Last week, I bought 20 packs of generic Kool Aid on sale. So all week, I've been itching to dye something, anything. I pulled some off-white Regia sock yarn from the stash and proceeded to skein it up. This involves the knob on the cutlery drawer and the knob on the pantry door - about 6 feet apart. There's also some yelling at the cats since they want to play with the yarn. While the yarn was soaking in plain water, I looked at all the colours to see what I wanted to do. I've never mixed colours before so all my previous dyeing resulted in bright Kool Aid colours. But I decided I wanted a plum-y look so I grabbed the cherry and grape hoping that it would turn out. I mixed 2 packets of grape in a cup of water. Then I added one cherry and checked the colour with piece of paper towel. It wasn't red enough so I added another cherry and the colour was about right. I dumped the mix into a big bowl and added another 7 cups of water. I used the dip method - dunk a chunk of yarn in the dye, wait, pull it out, and repeat until you run out of yarn. I varied the amount of wait time from minutes to seconds to achieve different tones of the same colour. And voila! Not too bad if I do say so myself.