hi this is Rebecca from chemnets and I'm here today with a fun dying experiment I want to try to create a speckled yarn using Kool-Aid powder and a wool nylon blend the yarn today is nitpicks stroll glimmer yarn it is a as I said a super washable nylon blend 70 wool 25 nylon and 5 stelina which gives it a little bit of a fun Sparkle now I pre-soaked this yarn overnight in a mixture of 16 cups of water and three tablespoons of white vinegar it is not necessary to heat the or to soak the yarn overnight about 30 minutes would be sufficient and it's also not necessary to use vinegar in this case but I was soaking yarn for another tutorial so I had this in there as well I am starting out with four colors of dried Kool-Aid this is lemon lime uh I think lemon or lemon limeade or limeade the label has been torn off when I saved it uh orange uh cherry and ice blue raspberry lemonade so my plan is to occasionally dip fork in water or something dip in the powder and then apply it to the yarn and kind of random places I could just do could have just done oh you can't see where I am I add a little too much water so now I've got a bit of this red paste here I could have done tried just doing straight dry powder but which I learned from doing dry yarn on fiber it takes a while um go on so I've kind of got basically even a paste whoops what was that a chunk all right I'm gonna let that be but yeah I'm gonna dip Fork the water occasionally you can see now as the dye is getting a bit more wet that this is spreading out a bit but I am just really poking along and I'm going to need to make sure to try to go underneath some of these sections to add color as well because they you know this is probably is not going to penetrate the fiber very far I like working with Kool-Aid because it smells really good and I really really like experimenting with new techniques I might need to open up some other packets um color so where the skeins are tied off I can't spread the fiber out as far but it's okay if the colors end up mixing a bit I just do not want to have a lot of volume of water here because a large volume of water could result in a large volume of water could result in getting like the colors mixing and spreading too far which is why I initially removed as much as the water as possible and so unlike the before when I was using in my previous video when I use an eyedropper to apply saturated colors here I'm really getting smaller flocks of color but I know I don't want to use up all of the red that I have quite yet because I know that I will probably need to turn this over to apply Color to the back now I am going to do some blue that's a lot on there so I started with the red because red is one of the most potent colors of Kool-Aid blue is a lot the blues are a lot less have a lot less dye per packet than the Reds do but this is kind of fun just going random way across tapping tapping color on all right a little more water get some more dye on here so you know in theory you could you know you could do this with anything that's somewhat absorbent and start with non dry food coloring I was just hoping to get darker patches of color this time and if I mix the Kool-Aid in water and then started applying it it would the each patch would be paler the other thing that I've learned that I learned the last time I was working on this I'm making a speckled yarn I said I had to move the yarn around a lot to get any kind of reasonable coverage because right here you're like oh it looks like I've got dots everywhere but if you shook the yarn all of a sudden you'll be like oh there's a lot of like bare patches in this section so these colors may end up spreading a bit but I am not super concerned so let me show you what my palette looks like so far and I didn't even move this off all the way before I went to start getting some green time's getting down deep ly penetrate a little bit I will flip this over um for moving on so I think I started to say that I did say before that Kool-Aid has citric acid in the mix so that is actually sufficient to die hang on so in some of these places the places the color repeat will be longer I'm trying to remember to go across the grain of yarn so that way I get speckled the color in as short a distance across the fiber as possible but given that I am making this up as I go along I am pretty happy and how these specs are turning out and then once we're done we will use the microwave to set the color because you need in your dying yarn you need the color source which in this case is the Kool-Aid you need the asset source which is both vinegar and citric acid today and then you need to have a heat source and we'll use the microwave to steam this yarn but you can also use a steamer crock pot many different things that that work this is kind of cool looking this time I am going to rinse it off now I'm going to add so the other thing that's kind of nice that I can share now is that if you use um Kool-Aid but don't want to use a whole packet it can last for months I folded these in half and secured it with just like a chip clip and then put that inside a Ziploc bag and I'm using them right now I really enjoy playing around with these different techniques with you uh people ask me sometimes if I sell the Yarns that I create and I have no plans to do that in the mirror in the distant future or anything but some of these weird techniques I do are more labor intensive and take more time than like a I think that someone who is selling the yarn might do but hopefully from watching these videos you can see how easy and fun this is and so then you might decide to give it a try yourself and if you don't have access to Kool-Aid and want to use other food colorings to mix your colors I would try this with the fork with oh you could use like a Q-tip for a makeup dot or something that absorbs like a very little bit of the fiber before you apply it let's see oh that's a I think that's one of the biggest swatches I've had so far um really trying to keep these patches small can make them wow this is looking pretty cool all right I'm gonna flip this a little nervous because if you look closer actually there's not very many dry Flags it's kind of absorbed which is great that's exactly what I want but let's yeah see the back side is almost completely completely colorless oops again once again I'm spreading this out as much as I can and then like we did with my other speckled yarn will kind of keep moving it over and then adding specs until we are happy with the coverage that we get over the entire yarn I'm not sure how long I have been doing this right now um but a little labor intensive but I am still having a lot of fun just like I hope you are so anyway I'm gonna keep doing this and then I will come back and show you um the yarn when I am happy with the total coverage here's my palette now it actually really does look like paint that is pretty cool and the yarn is looking rather speckly um so now I am going to wrap it up I oh I guess I'm not sure if I said I'd covered my work surface in the plastic wrap that is what I will use um to help cook it oh my God I have a nice little jelly roll and hopefully you know the re it's nice this is still pretty dry because if this were wetter then some of the color could mush out and um then we would and we could end up with a soggy patch of color versus these smaller stacks so I've put this little jelly roll onto a micro microwave safe plate and I'm going to heat it two minutes at a time until it is warm to touch after a total of three minutes in the microwave the yarn is piping hot I am gonna let this cool down and then I will heat it for another two minutes and then let it cool completely before I unwrap and wash the fiber the jelly roll has cooled and I am ready to unwrap it but look at that you see no big pool where all the dye pulled or anything like that which is awesome because in the past when I have dye hand-painted sometimes the food coloring will just kind of pull out at the bottom and you end up with a mixed color so look at these back of color now I am since I used some dry food coloring I am expecting to get some color out uh or I wouldn't be surprised if the color came out in this lukewarm water with this soap but after the first little bit it seems as though actually the Tango color might just be from the soap that would be pretty exciting if there was no there are no clumps of food coloring that lasted so anyway I am going to wash this fiber until the water runs clear which I mean it's clear now and there's no longer soap in the fiber and then I will hang to dry here is our finished yarn look at these teeny tiny specks of color that we got we used a fork to apply dry Kool-Aid powder to yarn pre-soaked in a vinegar an overnight vinegar bath and we got vibrant tiny specks of color this turned out way better than I could have hoped and not only did we use Kool-Aid powder it was left over Kool-Aid powder from another dyeing experiment so this was less than four packets of color and we got all of these incredibly vibrant specs I cannot wait to explore this technique more in the future thank you so much for watching this dying experiment with me I am Rebecca from chemnitz and I hope you enjoy your next dying Adventure