Fun with Food Colouring

Just before christmas I was lucky enough to get a take my turn with a travelling swap box a group of friends organised earlier in the year. The box when it arrived was a treasure trove of delights and after much deliberaion I chose the following:

That is some Baby Bella bamboo yarn, some gorgeous Needlefood sock yarn in Mango Smoothie and a wee pack containing playsilks and kool-aid for dying.

So when we were faced with some free time with nothing to do bwtween christmas and new year Mr A and I tackled some playsilk dying. I let Mr A choose the colours and he chose red and blue, and as we didn't have any red kool-aid we just used standard food colouring.
The first step was to soak the playsilks in a solution of white vinegar and hotnwater for about half an hour. While this wa going on we mixed up the dyes, the blue was two packets of berry blue kool-aid in 2 cups of water with a splash of vinegar and the red was a random amount of red food colouring in some water with a splash of vinegar (very scientific of me I know).

Drain the playsilks and add to the dye solutions

Cover and microwave for 2 mins on high, then a further 1 min then stand to cool.

Rinse the playsilks in cool water until the water runs clear, this was straight away with the blue one but the red took a lot of rinsing, I think I may have been a bit overzealous with the red food colouring.  Then hang on the line to dry.

Now play!  Mr A adores these and has been really creative in finding different ways of playing with them.

And Miss M wasn't one to miss out on the fun either!

I'm really pleased with how these turned out and it was a great activity to share with Mr A.  Ours turned out with a mottled look but we could have got a more solid colour by agitating the playsilks more in the dye solution.  The same dying technique can also be used for wool :-)