MDSW awoke a desire me and, for days afterward, I couldn’t get it off my mind.  I didn’t want to spin other peoples’ colours — I wanted to make my own.  I wanted to dye.

I’ve dyed before, years ago, but that was with natural dyes and under the tutelage of someone who knew so much she made it easy…  Easy enough that I’ve forgotten entirely how to do it.  So, I asked my friend Cosy for help: how do I get started?  She suggested… Kool-Aid.

Kool-Aid.  I knew — vaguely — that you could dye with it, but I never thought much of it.  Surely it couldn’t be much snuff?  But Cosy assured me, and pointed out that unlike very toxic normal dyes, Kool-Aid was toddler friendly.  Now that was a compelling argument,  so I ran out to the supermarket and picked up a dozen packets of the stuff.  And as I chucked them in my basket, a cloud of insanely synthetic fruit-flavoured scent rose up and took me straight back to my childhood.

I’m not very good at walking before I run.  I’m very good at running before I’m ready, tripping over my own two feet and falling flat on my face.  And in that vein, I decided to try to replicate the purple and green roving I got MDSW.  An easier start would have been something more side-by-side on the colour wheel — something like a nice red and a nice yellow gently blending into a pretty little orange.  Purple and green are almost opposite each other on the colour wheel and a lot more difficult to excute deftly.  I was undaunted.

Crockpots make good dyeing vessels — they keep the water at the right temperature without letting it reach a boil and felt the wool — but I didn’t have any handy.  So I decided instead to have a go at my own version of handpainting.

I laid a long length of clingfilm out on the deck and put the wool on top.  Then I poured my Kool-Aid mixture over it.  There wasn’t enough, but there was a little brightly coloured sludge at the bottom of each cup, so I added a bit more water and hoped it would stick to the white sections of wool I poured it over.  Then I rolled the clingfilm up like a jellyroll, put it in a glass bowl, and stuck it in the microwave.

It was later that day that I realised that hot wool stinks.  And the smell of hot wool and combined with the sickly fruit scent of Kool-Aid is really quite stomach-churning.  And that once that smell is permeates your microwave, you’re going to smell it every time you try to prepare some food… for months.  I decided to dig those crockpots out of the moving boxes in the garage.

Anyway… the result… It was disasterous.  Purple and green should not be attempted by amateurs and certainly not with Kool-Aid.  Nor should subtle meltings of pinks into blues which, through the medium of Kool-Aid, risk coming out as garish red-and-blue bunting.

Behold the inspiration…

And the abysmal results…

But we can end this cautionary tale on a high note — the good news is the situation was (somewhat) salvageable.  More on that soon…