This is probably the first project I saw online that I knew I wanted to make for the girls, back when they were infants. It's all over the mommy blogs and I feel like I earned a merit badge by finally tackling it! My sister Katharine was visiting and we made an evening of it.
We were amazed at how well it worked, and a little scared to ever drink Kool-aid (or get it near clothes made of plant fibers!) I have read so many blog posts about how to do this, so what we did was kind of a mishmash of lots of tutorials I've seen. I knew I wanted strong colors, so we used a couple of packets per scarf, and we boiled them. First we soaked the scarves in hot water and vinegar.
I was happy to use my smock that I got years ago at an estate sale. The silks came out of the soaking water very clingy.
We started by using my roasting pan, after I read that you were able to use less water this way and thus get a richer color. This is 4 or 5 packets of blue lemonade.
Here's a few packets of cherry mixed with one black cherry.
Rinsing them out took a while. Some of the blogs say not much color comes out except for the red colors, but we had a lot of dye coming out with every color. I think it's because we used so many packets, but it was worth it for the deep colors we achieved.
More rinsing!
We discovered that the Kool-aid started to eat away the nonstick liner of my pan! Those silver spots in the corner of the pan are where the bare pan is showing through. I think it must be from the citric acid. Maybe another reason to keep Kool-aid on hand for dyeing but not drinking!
Here's the nice bright green we got from the Lemon/Lime flavor. A fun bonus from dyeing this way is the awesome smell! Our favorites were grape and orange, which smelled so much like orange tic tacs that Kate and I craved them the rest of the night. Sadly, once the silks dried they did not smell anymore.
My awesome sister stirring the pot! One neat aspect of dyeing was watching the dye water turn gradually clear as the silks absorbed all the color.
Here they are drying on a laundry rack outside. We had to do this at night after the girls were asleep since the silks are a Christmas gift. I think I would like to do this again with them when they are a little older. It was such a fun process.
And finally, our awesome stack! I didn't alter this photo - it's so weird how the combination of the saturated colors and the sheen of the silk gave my iPhone camera trouble. You can see we dyed the whole rainbow plus pink (a nice bubble gum color that isn't showing up well here.) We also left a white silk undyed so they can play "ghost" which has been a favorite game since Halloween. I am especially proud of the bright yellow we got. A lot of the tutorials I saw showed a washed out yellow silk, but Kate had the great idea to add yellow food coloring to the lemonade dye and it worked so well. Now I think you could dye the silks only with food coloring and no Kool-aid, but it sure wouldn't smell as good!
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