Saturday, February 12, 2011

How to color wool with KoolAid

A few of my friends recently told me that they are experimenting with different artificial colorings easily available in grocery stores. What we all are looking for is a coloring that would be inexpensive, reliable and not too harmful. The new favorite in the felting community is KoolAid that could be found in any grocery store in US. I bought a few small packs of different colors to try it out.
koolaid
To experiment with KoolAid coloring we will need to create wool felted beads first. To read about how to create ones you can go to my previous post on how to create wool acorns.
felted wool acorns
To make colored water I added powder from KoolAid packs to water in a few small plastic containers. As a result I got five containers with brightly colored water. I added approximately a tea spoon of powder to every container. Then I put each of my five beads into a separate container and let the beads suck in the colored water.
lemon summer felted necklace
It makes sense to heat containers with water and beads in a microwave for color to fully penetrate the beads. I microwaved my containers for approximately 3 minutes. I didn't want to boil my beads but might experiment with boiling next time.
red berry felted wool earrings
The result is pretty impressive. All of my five beads turned out to be colored differently. The most intensive, bright and beautiful color turned out to be orange. Yellow bead was not that intensely colored but I really like the light lemon color of the bead. The cherry color turned out to be very intense and vivid as well. In general all the beads have vivid and bright colors as a result of coloring. They smell of oranges, lemons and cherries!
It's definitely worth experimenting with this powder as theoretically one could mix different colors and get some interesting results. My only advice is to wear rubber gloves as it will be very hard to get the color off your hands once it gets there!

This post describes my personal experience with a particular product.
Please be careful trying to replicate the experiment!!!

7 Comments:

Arctida said...

Very cool experiment and beautiful colors!

GalaFilc said...

Я тоже иногда крашу этими красками .

IrinaN said...

Да, я уже несколько раз об этом методе читала... Одно можно сказать, что ж они пьют????

TonyaUtkina said...

Ира, вот и я о том же! Ты не представляешь какого цвета у меня теперь руки! Я не знаю, как их отмывать! Дети испугались:)))

Jane_Bo said...

Beautiful bright colors! Nice on wool but not for drinking)

SocksAndMittens said...

Looks cute :)

Brunson said...

Да, я уже несколько раз об этом методе читала... Одно можно сказать, что ж они пьют????