Breaking Grape Kool-Aid

This past weekend, I tried my hand at some Kool-Aid®* dyeing. I have been watching YouTube videos about dyeing for a while, and stumbled across one I really liked from ChemKnits. Actually all her tutorials are really fun and after watching a bunch, I now want to try ALL the things! But I had to start somewhere and this was it: 

Looks awesome, right? I love the idea of breaking apart the dye into its component colors to create a tonal effect…and it’s so easy too! I’m not a huge fan of the color produced by the grape Kool-Aid though, so I decided to modify it. I used 3 packets of grape, and 1 packet of blue raspberry lemonade. Basically just to create a bluer grape.

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Using some recently handspun merino wool, I followed the steps as described in the video and sure enough…the dye broke!

After most of the initial dye was absorbed, I decided I wanted more color. So I put some of the (now almost clear) hot dye water into a separate bowl, and mixed in 3 drops of red food coloring and 1 drop of blue. I poured the mixture back in the pot, and gave it a gentle stir. This gave me some deeper purple spots, and made the blues more of a purply blue. And here’s the end result – so amazing!

I’m definitely going to have to try this technique with other color combinations at some point. I wonder if it would work with green….I’ll let you know when I find out! 🙂

*Kool-Aid is a registered trademark of Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC. Use of the the trademark in this post does not imply any affiliate or endorsement.