"Breaking" Dye is when you start with a single color of dye and you see different hues in your final yarn. Food coloring based colors that frequently break are purples and blacks becausee they contain a mixture of blue and red dyes which bind to the yarn at different rates.
In the past I've seen some great pictures of yarn dyed with Grape KoolAid that has broken into reds and blues, but when I tried it myself I got a fairly solid color. Of course, this first attempt was using a 20% wool blend AND I was adding wet yarn to a dyebath that was heated slowly. My more recent expreience with breaking yarns has come trough adding dry fibers to a hot dyebath so that the reds will strike the parts of the fiber that enter the bath first. I decided to give this a try in my most recent dyeing experiment.
I mixed 4 pack of Kool-Aid Grape Unsweetened Soft Drink Mix
in 10 cups of water. 100g of KnitPicks Palette bare yarn. As you will see in the video, the colors started adhering to the yarn almost immediately.
