
A few years ago I bought some hideous neon green virgin wool from an estate sale. It seemed like a good deal at the time ($0.50 a skein!) and the vintage label (which of course I don't seem to have kept) appealed to me. This was old yarn! And unused yarn! I can save this yarn and give it purpose.
Skip at least two years and one baby, and yeah... no purpose was found. So this afternoon I decided to get off my butt, hand the
For reference: I followed Maiya Mahem's Kool Aid Dyeing 101. It's very easy: soak the yarn, heat water on the stove, add dye, leave yarn until it's soaked in colour, squeeze out water, leave to dry. I also received valuable guidance on prepping the yarn from my knitting wizard elizarde. The helpers on the internet, they are the best.
OK, so first I used two packs of Cherry and one Orange Kool-Aid. This was the result:

Not as saturated as I would have liked, but I was dying over an existing colour, so it was to be expected. Definitely more useable than neon green.
Then I moved onto Kroger food coloring. This is a liberal application of blue:

Much better. In fact, this is really awesome! I love this colour! I especially like the variation food coloring provides, you seem to have greater control over how the colour spreads across the hank.
So I went all daring and did a combination of green, yellow and red. The yellow turned the neon green towards celery, the green saturated the neon and the red might just be there because I realised there were undyed parts still showing. But it looks marvellous:

It took most of the afternoon to air dry (I think I should have squeezed it out more), but this was otherwise a quick and easy project that gave me new yarn without much effort. Kool-Aid is cheap, food coloring is about $4 a box and with the right care, the colours shouldn't fade much over time. Definitely going to do this again - I have undyed hanks AND RIT dye in my stash. Who knows what could happen.