Baked Kool-Aid fiber is much better for you than cake, and smells just as good.

Here is a recipe for “Baked kool-aid fiber,” which I made for two primary reasons:

1) I wanted to participate in the ravelry group Ply by Night‘s spin-and-knit-along, which this time requires kool-aid dyeing.

2) Regular kool-aid dyeing uses a microwave. I do not own a microwave.

Step one:  Gather the ingredients.

The fiber was easy, it was what I got for the January portion of the Spinning the Seasons fiber club by Knit it Up. The colorway was called Fresh Spun Snow.

Knit it up!

It’s quite pretty. There’s Superwash wool, silk, bamboo and firestar in it, which you can read.

So fluffy.

HOWEVER, it’s white. And I’ve never been too much of a fan of white. I just find it so PLAIN. It’s a pretty color and nice and bright, but things always look prettier to me in color. Also because of the spin-along, I decided to dye it.

The second part of obtaining the ingredients was not quite so easy. For the spin-along, we were supposed to get grape, black cherry and cranberry (I don’t believe cranberry actually exists, so I figured I’d just get something red.) I went to the grocery store: they had grape, orange and cherry. Annoyed, I went to another grocery store hoping for more selection. This time I got grape, orange, cherry and pink lemonade. I figured I wouldn’t find any better, so I decided on getting grape and deciding that cherry can stand in for both black cherry and cranberry. I went to two more grocery stores just to be sure, but they apparently don’t like interesting flavors of kool-aid where I live.

Oh well. So I took the fiber and put it in water in a cake pan, then poured the kool-aid over it. I didn’t want the koolaid to dye all of the fiber because I wanted it to make a heathered yarn.

It looks like cake.

Then I baked it at 400 for about 20 minutes until the water around the fiber was clear. (I’m not going to show that, because it looks basically the same except the water on the sides of the fiber is clear.)

Then I set it out to dry.

Here's the whole thing after dyeing. It looks like one of those ink-blot tests.

I got a big surprise. The grape separated out, so the silk took the red and the wool took the blue! Who’da thought?

It looks pretty layered like that.

This is only the middle section after I split them. It got almost all of the grape.

Now here’s a picture of it pulled into roving, so you can see how it makes a heather.

This is one of the red sections.

Omnomnomnom. My baked kool-aid fiber is just delicious!