When Kool-Aid is not good enough

I want to start my socka self patterning socks, but before I do that, I want to practice knitting in the round with very thin yarn. And I happen to have this yarn that seems just perfect for socks. It's wool and it's fingering weight. It comes from my late grandma's stash.










The problem is, I'm not crazy about this pale shade of yellow, so of course I'm going to enhance it with Kool-Aid. Since this is practice for self-patterning yarn, I attempted to create self-striping yarn. Yes, like those pretty Noro yarns that form solid stripes as you knit. I wrapped my yarn around a big plastic bottle, alternating 20 turns on top of the bottle with 20 turns on the bottom of the bottle, back and forth until I ended with two attached skeins, one of which was to be dyed with green apple Kool-Aid. The name of the flavor is actually arctic apple.









Well, this is a bad shade of Kool-Aid to dye with. It turns the water very cloudy. And it didn't help that the color of my yarn was yellow to begin with, I ended up with an unacceptably pale shade of green:











I did not have any more green Kool-Aid, but I happened to have a big bottle of BLUE mouthwash in the kitchen with me (the same bottle I had used to wind the yarn). Why, if you add blue to yellow, you get green, right? Of course, only if mouthwash coloring is taken up by wool.













And yes, it is! I was very surprised. I wonder if any brand of mouthwash could be used to dye wool. In any case I now have self striping yarn with alternating yellow and green sections... though my green stripes will be a little spotted with yellow here and there:









I tried to stir the yarn as much as I could to avoid the "variegated look". I guess the shallow bowl did not allow me much room. If I try this again, I'll use a much bigger bowl and I will keep squeezing the yarn with a plastic spoon, that gave me good results with my last kool-aid experiment.



Gosh, I'm starting to believe that I enjoy the dyeing much more than the knitting.