"That is the sexiest cupcake I've ever eaten!"

This week is the University of Minnesota's spring break. A couple of days ago, my brother sent me a link on Facebook for a recipe for red velvet cupcakes. Yesterday he came home for a few days. Today, we got to work.

Look at those beautiful cupcakes!

 

Possibly the hardest part is waiting for them to cool.

 The recipe says to serve the cupcakes with raspberries or strawberries, so we decided to take it one step further and filled the cupcakes with raspberry preserves (cupcake filling tip can be found here). In the end, we both agreed this had been a great idea.

A batch of frosting and a few sprinkles later, we stepped back to admire our work.

Who needs a cupcake bakery when you can make these beauties?

At this point, we could wait no longer. We both picked up a cupcake, unwrapped it, and dug in. Delicious!! Moist, still just a tiny bit warm, perfect amount of raspberry filling, beautiful creamy frosting (I'll take my brother's word that the frosting is good, I don't like cream cheese frosting and had mine plain.) When finished, my brother declared with feeling, "That is the sexiest cupcake I've ever eaten!!"

Kool-Aid and Wool

So, it’s been awhile, I guess. Ok, more than a while. Excuses are great things. Summer vacations, too much homework as a college student…but now it’s frigid February, I’ve graduated and have no job (speaking of which, if anyone wants to hire me…) no more excuses left. To start off my return to the blogosphere, I thought I would recap some of the fun things I’ve made since my last post.

First off, during the summer, a friend and I decided to try out a tutorial I found on Kool-Aid dying yarn. She knits, and I crochet, so this seemed like something right up our alley. The process is pretty simple. Take wool yarn, soak it in Kool-Aid, microwave, rinse, and let dry. And now the details.

  

 The tutorial says that one pack of Kool-Aid will dye 2 ounces of yarn, so I decided to split my yarn into 2 ounce hanks and make a bunch of fun colors. we found the easiest way to do this was with a cereal box.

 

We tied each hank loosely in a few places to keep it from tangling in the Kool-Aid. You can do this with pieces of the yarn being dyed, but I find using another color makes it easier to find them after dying. We then washed the yarn with a little laundry detergent and rinsed thoroughly.

  

And now it is time to dye (my friend and I probably had way too much fun telling anyone who asked us, that we were “dying”—I love homonyms!). The Kool-Aid went into the bowls; we mixed it with water, and then submerged the yarn.

 

 

Now this part can get a tiny bit tedious. You have to microwave each color for two minutes and then let it sit for two minutes to let it cool down so that it doesn’t boil. My friend and I swapped two colors in and out of the microwave so that when one bowl was cooking, the other was cooling, and vice versa. This worked very well, especially since we have two microwaves at my house so we could have four colors going at once. And since we were using Kool-Aid, we of course had to mix up a pitcher of the sweet stuff and take a short trip back to childhood…although I don’t think they had mango Kool-Aid when I was a kid.

You will know when the yarn is done, because the water will be clear. Really, even the grape Kool-Aid absorbed completely and the water returned to its original, straight from the tap, clear. Like this:

 

Once you reach that point, you have to let the yarn cool in the water until it reaches room temperature. It was cooler outside than inside the kitchen at this point, so out to the deck we went!!

After what felt like an eternity, the water was finally cool, and we were able to continue. From here, we drained the water off, rinsed the yarn in cool water, and hung it up to let it dry.

 

 

Isn’t it pretty?? :)

I highly recommend hanging the yarn over a tub to let it dry, because as much as you wring it out, it’s still going to drip like crazy. It will probably take a few days to dry, so I suggest the guest bathroom.

Once the yarn is dry, all you have to do is wind it into a ball and figure out what you want to make with it!

And there you have it, hand dyed yarn from a pack of Kool-Aid. Whooda thunk it?? 

In the end, I do have some pointers from my own experience and from what I have read around the internet on similar tutorials:

• ·         Apparently, this technique only works of ANIMAL fibers. If it used to have feet, you can dye it with Kool-Aid. If not, find another way.

• ·         This is the same Kool-Aid many people might remember from childhood. It comes in a little foil packet and then you add sugar to make it sweet. DO NOT use “sugar free” Kool-Aid that contains artificial sweeteners. I can only imagine the sticky mess you would end up with. Of course, for dying yarn, you will forgo the sugar :)

• ·         You have to cook the yarn until the water turns clear. I know it’s hard to believe, but it WILL look like clear, fresh water again. (some flavors might leave the water cloudy, like the blue I used, but in the end, it’s white cloudy) If you don’t let it cook long enough and then cool down, the colors won’t stick and will wash out when you rinse it.

• ·         At the very end, I came up with the genius idea that this same technique can be used on the stove. Call me slow, but I finished five colors before I thought of this. It turns out that stove top actually works much better. You don’t have to let the water cool down to keep it from boiling, just turn the temperature down (and really, boiling a tiny bit isn’t going to ruin the yarn. I actually think it might have gotten done faster BECAUSE I accidentally let it boil for a few minutes.)

·         I recently found this tutorial on how to make multicolored yarn in the crock-pot with Kool-Aid. I tried it today, and it worked well. Seriously, is there anything you can’t make in a crock-pot??