Dyeing adventures- alpaca and nylon

I bought some thick sock yarn off the Internet, but as always there is the peril of colour choices. What I thought from the photo was dark grey, undyed and hot pink turned out to be dark green, yellow and reddish pink. I have to say I was not in love with it, and I had 200g!

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My first response to "meh I don't like this colour" is "oh well I can always dye it". The problem here was that this is an alpaca and nylon mix, I had never dyed either of those before, and I had heard alpaca will felt if you look at it crossly.

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Since I really couldn't think of anything to make with the yarn I figured I would give it a go on one ball and see what happened. I skeined both and dunked one in a pot of blue dye.

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Woohoo! No felting and the nylon didn't melt (even though the pot got rather hot and may have boiled a little, I am not sure what the melting point of nylon is). The dyeing was not a total success- the colours are still not quite what I hoped for, but I think they are an improvement. This is most likely due to the high nylon content which is unaffected by the acid dyes, all the fluffy alpaca fibres are now a nice bright blue.

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I still don't know what to make, it is meant to be a sock yarn, so maybe socks, but there are quite a lot of fluffy alpaca fibres sticking out of the yarn, so it may be somewhat tickly.