Knitter's Pinkie

I've heard some people complain about knitter's wrist, but what I have is a sore left pinkie. This has never happened before and I think it's related to the very thin dpn's I'm using to knit these socks. So in order to rest my pinkie, I chose a different activity: another Kool-Aid experiment (with more sock yarn, not very smart of me).



This time I want the width of the stripes to vary a little bit. So I alternated 15 turns around the top of the same old bottle with eight turns in the middle and 15 turns at the bottom of the bottle. And then, going up, another 8 turns in the middle and 15 turns around the top. The idea is that the color in the middle will create narrower stripes. However, this color will appear twice as often. After winding the yarn, I ended with three connected skeins:





Which I dyed with Sam's Choice cherry flavor (bright red), Wyler's fruit punch flavor (pink), and black cherry Kool aid (dark red). This is the result:







The Wyler's fruit punch had a white precipitate that clouded the jar and it was hard to tell whether the yarn was properly absorbing the color. I was worried about getting yellow "borders" between the colors, but that did not happen. Yarn acts as a candle wick, so the color traveled through the connecting strands. The problem actually was to keep the water at the same level in all three jars to prevent color mixing, since I was dyeing the three sections at the same time in three separate jars.


I am convinced that this would be much cheaper and work perfectly well if I were using food coloring and white vinegar. But I don't usually have any of these ingredients in my kitchen, so I'd rather stick to my little envelopes of junk drinks. They probably smell much better than vinegar anyway.