The last of the wooly wonders (for now)

This is my latest wool project which is funny since the reason I first wanted to start crocheting and knitting again last year was to make some wool diaper covers. I finally got around to making some and let me tell you, they were easy-peasy!

My first was a soaker using Amy's Little Fire Crochet Soaker pattern in size small (although thanks to Craig they are now firmly embedded in my mind as those Fire Crotch pants, darn that boy!).
I didn't know how to do stitches into posts or a no-chain foundation but neither is hard and the whole thing only took a couple of hours. It's not perfect (my fault, not the pattern) but I really like it. I thought it looked big originally but once I tried putting it over a small fitted I realized that it won't be. Of course, I can't tell you how it will work on a baby, but I have high hopes. I had heard a soaker takes about one skein of wool but they must be talking about a smaller skein because I didn't even used half of a fisherman's wool skein.

Since I had planned to only get one soaker per skein so I had a little "free" wool to play with and wanted to try dyeing it. There are a lot of ways to dye animal fibers but they pretty much all involve dye, acid, water and heat. I used kool-aid as my dye since it's cheap, non-toxic, and already contains citric acid. Craig picked out the colors (orange and lemon-lime) using a chart I found online. I can't find the chart I used but this one is even better since it shows how you can achieve a more adult friendly color scheme. I love the bright colors for baby clothes but I don't know how many tooty fruity colors I would want to wear myself.

I wrapped the wool very loosely, tied it loosely with a small piece of wool then soaked it in water for a few hours to prepare it. The water doesn't soak in evenly but I was wanting the mottled effect so that was good. If you want a more consistent color, supposedly you can add a drop of dishwashing liquid to the soaking water.

Then I mixed the kool-aid with water to dissolve in a glass. It doesn't matter how much water you use as long as it covers the wool. The depth of the end color depends on the dye to wool ratio. For a little bit of orange, I used one packet of orange. I was dying a larger amount of wool green so I used two packets of lemon-lime.

To heat the wool and allow it to absorb the dye, I used two different methods - the double boiler and the crockpot. You can do it on a pot directly on the stove or in the microwave but you want to make sure the water doesn't boil or the wool with felt and you'll be left with a big mess. The crockpot is just what it sounds like, I put the wool and green dye in a crockpot on high. For the double boiler, I put the orange dye and wool in a mason jar inside a pot with a couple of inches of simmering water. The mason jar method is good for if you want to do sections of different colors, you just put part of the yarn into different jars all sitting in the same pot. I might try that later. Both methods took about 30 minutes. It's really easy to tell when it is done, the water will be clear because all the dye has been absorbed.

Once that happens, turn off the heat and let it cool. Don't try and mess with it now or it may felt. Once it is cool, rinse well in room temperature water. Then hang to dry. Since it is just kool-aid, the clean-up was pretty easy although you might want to wear rubber gloves so you don't end up with green hands. The hardest part really is having patience and waiting for it to cool, then dry. But the end results were worth it.

I really like the way the orange turned out. I used the extra for some practice knitting which looks awful but you can see the colors variation well.
The green was too light initially so I redid it using a couple more packets of green. The end result was a nice bright green although it wasn't as variegated due to the second dying. Here it is turned into a pair of Amy's Little Fire Longies with them.

The side view shows the nice shaping this pattern has.
They are very bright but I do like them. If Nigel turns out to be a boy, I think it would be really cute to add orange cargo-type pockets on the side.

So for $5 worth of yarn and not even $1 worth of kool-aid, I've made two covers and I still have some of both colors left. Not enough for another soaker but I'll save it for the waists and trims of future soakers. Dying wool was so much fun, I can't wait to try again. Perhaps something in Blue Moon Berry or Lemonade?

PS: For those of you non-crocheters/knitters, you can use the same kool-aid technique to dye play silks for much less than you can buy pre-colored ones. I love the idea of play silks as a great opened ended toy.