Koolaid dye

This weekend I dyed 2 skeins of yarn from knitpicks using the knitty koolaid tutorial and chart as a guide. Here's a picture of one dyed skein of merino wool:



To color it, I used two packets of lemonade koolaid, and one packet each of cherry and orange koolaid. Our whole house still smells like koolaid and I'm afraid I'm never going to wash the fruit punch smell off my hands. Even our kitty, Luna, who loves yarn refused to touch it. You can see her tentatively sniffing it in the picture above, but the fruitiness was just too much for her to bear.

I attempted to wind the yarn into center pull balls by hand. I contemplated buying a yarn ball winder, but I didn't think they were worth the $40 price tag. But after spending h-o-u-r-s this weekend winding yarn into tangled, sloppy balls and then unwinding and unknotting them, I see the value of a yarn ball winder. I've ordered one from knitpicks.com and am anxiously awaiting its arrival.

After I finally get the yarn wound into a ball, I'm going to attempt to knit some toe-up socks with the dyed yarn using these sites as references:

toe-up KAL
universal toe-up socks
anastasia socks
chain cast on tutorial
short row heel tutorial
picot edge variations