Kool-Aid Fun

 I know its been a long while--sorry, my friends!

Its been a busy time lately and I have actually been working on a lot of crafts. One of the things that I have been doing is working on a lot of felted sweater bits.  In have finally amassed a good stash of sweaters to use but the color palette left a lot to be desired. So I decided that I would just make my own colors by dyeing what I needed with....Kool-Aid. Lots of advantages with the stuff--no nasty chemicals involved so I can use my cooking pots. Its readily available (well, more or less).  Its already pre-measured. And its cheap!

 So check out this gorgeous peacock blue in my first pic. Isn't it lovely? And here's my pile of already cut up and felted wool bits ready to go. Some is already blue, but its a rather dull blue so I wanted to see if I could beef it up a little with some Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade flavor Kool-Aid. OK, yeah, yeah, basically, its blue. That's all you need to know.

 Here is a close-up of my "before" wool.  As you can see I have blue, pink and some off-white.

At this point I have boiled the Kool-Aid and wool for about 5 minutes and then let it sit for about an hour. Note how the water is now clear again--all of the dye has been taken up by the wool. Cool, huh? The citric acid in the Kool-Aid acts as the mordant so the dye is permanent.

After drying in a hot dryer (which further promotes the felting) I have a beautiful pile of various shades of blue felt bits. Much more to my liking!


Now I just have about 9 more different colors to try!