Colour

 Some of the women from our playgroup put together a stash of beautiful hand dyed yarns to sell at the advent fair. I had the *ahem* privilege of dividing a ginormous 1kg skein of undyed yarn into 100g lots.

 If you've never seen a 1kg skein, here it is -

 and of course the boy had to have a turn holding the yarnzilla too -

Of course me being the only long-term knitter who owns neither swift nor wool winder, I wound all 2170 metres of it by hand into balls, so they could be weighed properly, before winding them into individual skeins ready to be dyed.

I always think a drying rack never looks so pretty as when it is covering with freshly dyed yarn..

I dyed this one for myself too, it's 200g of blue & green gradient - 

and more recently, a little 50g skein -

and 50g of 12ply in graduated reds -

and Lexi did one for herself using koolaid -

I'm hoping I'll get a chance to do a heap more soon!!

Bath-tub Abuse

Wow, just uncovered an ancient draft in blogger!! I can't believe how different my kids hair is lol...

So when paul directed his school production involving costuming over 360 kids, whose foolish idea was it to dye plain t-shirts?

oh. right. oops.

80 or so shirts were dyed by the 9-10 year olds who would be wearing them, but the rest..?? Well, our poor bathtub...

60+ orange low-water immersion shirts...

There were 30ish red ones & 8 brown ones too..

15m of calico LWI'ed brown-

(and an assistant)

which we cut & sewed into (custom!!) skirts & loincloths-

and the school kids made headbands and salt-dough necklaces to match-

and this lovely mess..?

purple tie-dyed shirts for all the new entrants!

the big kids used templates made from laminated card to create whatever design they liked, then sprayed with dye-

and another 40ish kids had "Tree Keeper" tees like this-

which paul sprayed with 2 interlocking stencils, this one was for the green-

and then a second for the brown.

And conveniently enough, I don't have any photos on my computer of them actually in use! Doh... But they looked pretty cool, and it was a very cost effective way to create cohesive costumes for so many kids!

The techniques we used are all explained in this post (which also shows the vintage of this project!!)

Dyeing Three Ways

Paul is directing & organising his school's show later in the year, and we thought it would be good to dye the kids t-shirts as an easy way to differentiate between the groups... so naturally a spot of experimentation was in order ;-)

we needed to document the process so that it can be taught to the other teachers, so i thought i may as well share it here too!

We were using Procion MX fibre reactive dye + soda ash, and playing with Low Water Immersion dyeing, Spray dyeing, and good ol' Tie Dyeing!!

Firstly we divided the cotton shirts into different colours/techniques, weighed them, and noted the details on scraps of paper-

We then took the shirts for tie dyeing & spray dyeing and soaked them in a soda ash solution - 1 cup soda ash per 4L water - for 15+ minutes (15 is the minimum, up to an hour is fine)

meanwhile.... the low water immersion-

the LWI fabric DOESN'T get soaked, but instead you crumple it up so that it looks like a brain, and cram it snuggly into bowls-
then you mix up your dye as per the instructions (i was working with amounts varying from 2.5oz-4oz of dry fabric, so was using between 1/8tsp-1tsp of dye powder!) and pour it over your fabric-
i added more of the blue dye than the purple (cos i was too generous mixing up the blue, as per usual), and you can see the difference in effect with the finished product...

leave to sit for 40min or so (while messing around with other techniques!), then add a cup or so of your soda ash solution prepared above-
you don't need to smoosh it or stir it, just leave to soak for as long as you can stand - apparently 8 hours is the minimum, up to 48 is good, but who has that kind of patience?

then rinse, warm/hot wash, and dry!

you can see the difference between the dye effects here-
the purple had room to spread, and split across the spectrum, so there are reddish-plum areas, and some stretching all the way to pale blue - whereas the blue had more dye to spread throughout the fabric, so just created a gentle mottled look-

now... Spray dyeing-

first you need to cut out a template - it can either be a whole sheet with just the image you want missing, or *just* a shape, to create a silhouette... we used plastic clearfile pockets, but i've seen leaves used which is quite cool too...

(we learnt though that we would have got better results if we had weighed/stuck down our template somehow!)

once your fabric has soaked for a while, wring it out, lay it onto a flat surface (we used the bottom of the bath) - if you don't want the image to bleed through onto the back you'll need to slip a plastic bag or something inside.

lay your template over the top, then lightly spray your pre-mixed dye on!
be sure you cover the whole template, and try to ensure the template is snug against the fabric
leave to set for 8+ hours-
then rinse, warm/hot wash & dry!

ta da!
as i said before, we discovered that we would have got better results if our templates were held down somehow, and the pink was a bit wishy-washy really...
but it's a fun technique, and would be an easy way for older kids to decorate shirts :-)

finally tie dyeing-

you don't have to spend long googling to come up with all sorts of different ways you can tie your fabric, but we were after something a bit like crazy tiger stripes, so after our shirts had soaked, we wrung them out, and just twisted them up & bound them with some polyester sewing thread...

i had read that a common beginners mistake with tie dye is to be too sparing with the dye, so you end up with an entirely white middle, so we popped our tied up shirts into a bowl, then added plenty of dye-
and gave them a good squish-
(yeah my hands were purple for about 5 days - and a whole week later my nails are still quite dark!)

after an hour or so i tipped out the excess dye - but didn't squeeze it at all - then left it to sit for 8+ hours...

then just like the others - rinse, warm/hot wash & dry!
the one on the left was just twisted up, but the right one we concertina wrinkled first *then* twisted.


now as i said before, i went overboard mixing up the blue dye, and we had the bowl of soda ash solution left sitting there.....

soooo i dumped one of paul's manky old white shirts in the soda ash, then 15min later tipped the dye in too.... gave it a stir occasionally, then left it like everything else...
still not the world's most beautiful shirt, but a definite improvement on how it was!!
( i could have tossed 1/2 a cup of salt in to make the colour more even, but didn't)

so there you go, three different ways of dyeing fabric using the same materials!

it was a fun experiment, and we've got a few ideas about how we would improve them in future, but if you've got some plain ol' t-shirts or fabric hanging around, then i really recommend giving them a go!

(i've posted about LWI dyeing before - with multiple colours - here!)

Small amounts, adding up to make a work of art...

(gold star to anyone who can place that quote *without* googling! and if you cheat & google, no it's NOT Streisand!)

So it's only taken me forever, but i finally got round to trying gradient dyeing!

the basic gist is, you unwind your balls of yarn into a skein, then divide the skein into a series of smaller bundles, one after another....(lesson #1 - tie the bundles up with different colour synthetic yarns & write down the order! this way you know what order the bundles go in!)

then following your favourite yarn dyeing technique you pop each bundle into a separate bowl of dye....(lesson #2 - check that the dye IN the pot matches the label on the pot before you make your plan. i thought i had sky blue, seaspray & navy.. turns out the seaspray was ultra violet! luckily i noticed this before i mixed the dye up & adjusted accordingly.
lesson #3 - also check first that you actually have enough bowls or containers for all the different mixes you need!! i was using procion, which doesn't need heat to set, so thankfully they didn't need to be microwave safe)

rinse, then dry your yarn....(lesson #4 - don't tangle it. how you avoid that i don't know though.)

re-skein your yarn...
wind it into a ball....
then knit it up!the pattern i used is the very cute & snuggly Owlie Sleepsack, knit in 12ply it's a quick alternative to a blanket for little bubs.
heh heh.. owls..

(about those various lessons above... i got the bundles for the 3rd & 4th colours mixed up! so the middle should have gone- dark blue, pale purply blue, dark purple, pinky purple, pale pink, but the pale purply blue & dark purple got switched. doh. and they weren't even the colours i was planning for this project in the first place. doh. and tangling speaks for itself really. doh. but i'm very happy with the finished result anyway!!!)

oh yeah, i've now got a little tab up the top for the various tutorials & recipes that i've shared! hopefully they might be of use sometime :)

my little big boy

my little guy was about to get a whole year older (it happens overnight you know) and so i decided he needed to join in on our first proper family birthday tradition - the felted crowns.

so i started with some wool-
(yes it's pink & purple, it was left over from lexi's so-long-ago Tigger Cardi (look how little she is!), and the only feltable stuff left in my stash!)

some food colouring & vinegar,

and some of this stuff-
and.... ta da!


the butterfly theme was because we inherited a couple of monarch caterpillars a month or so ago from our playgroup, and we've had a constant stream of them to look after ever since! Eli absolutely loves them, and has been finding the process fascinating, so i thought it would be a fitting theme for his crown :-)
i think he likes it!

i was incredibly proud of lexi too, who was inspired by my efforts to make eli a present herself as well! she decided to make him a toy horse, which turned into a unicorn, so i cut the basic shape out of felt (i like minimum 70% wool felt), showed her how to do a whip stitch, and off she went! I did the eyes for her, and threaded her needle, but the rest was all her work, even choosing the colours (it's red on one side, purple on the other ;-) ).

(there was a minor controversy on eli's birthday when she decided she actually wanted it to have a short mane, so hid behind the lounge curtains to give it a haircut without asking first, but really since it was her project she had to be forgiven!)

and of course there was birthday cake... not one of my sleeker efforts to be sure *blush*
but it tasted good & the kids loved it, so i'm happy!