Tea Dying Cotton

When I was making the crazy quilt choker, just before Halloween, I wanted to keep all the colors muted and Earth-tone, so I tea dyed some natural colored cotton lace. A couple days ago I found a beautiful light-weight cotton blouse on a clearance rack at Old Navy and decided that I wanted to make it match the choker.

I have terrible luck with white clothing anyway. It always ends up stained. By dying the shirt with tea, I have, for once, chosen to stain my shirt.

Here is what the shirt looked like when I first brought it home:


The dye bath was 14 cups of water, brought to a boil in a large sauce pan, to which was added 28 teabags (the cheapest black tea I could find), 2 tea bags for every 1 cup of water. I also added 1 cup of white vinegar to the boiling water to help the dye to be color-fast. Once the water was boiling, the heat was turned off and the tea was left to steep for the next 10-15 minutes.


Next, the shirt was rinsed in clear water and wrung out well, to make sure it was clean and damp, but would not dilute the tea with more water.


Then, the shirt was added to the tea/dye bath. I used a large wooded spoon to stir it around and make sure all the cloth was completely submerged in the tea.


The shirt, then spent about 45 minutes soaking in the hot tea, being stirred and poked at occasionally.
At the end of the 45 minutes, the shirt was removed from the tea and rinsed several times in clear, cool water.



To further help the setting of the color, the shirt can be placed in a hot dryer or ironed dry.


The shirt is now a perfect match for the tea dyed lace on my choker.


I'm thinking about replacing the little plastic buttons on the shirt, as well, but I haven't found any I like yet.

Pounding Plants: Leaf Print T-Shirt

Blaze got a lot of attention yesterday, when he wore his new plant T-shirt for the fist time. I ended up explaining to several people how it was made.

To start out with, we collected leaves and used wide packing tape to attach the leaves to a plain white T-shirt, making sure that the leaves were completely covered withtape.



We put some newspaper inside the T-shirt to keep the plant "juices" from bleeding through to the other layer of fabric. Then we put a board on the ground outside to use as a hard surface for hammering.

Here is the fun part,
the plants must be hammered to a pulp. Don't hold back. Get out all your frustrations, because the more pulverized the plant, the better the print will be. We took turns hammering, because it took quite a bit of pounding to get a good result.



Next, the T-shirt was turned inside out and ironed to help set the colors in the cloth. I placed the newspaper on the ironing board to prevent any leakage from the plant getting on the ironing board cover.



The tape and the leaves were then peeled off, revealing the print left behind on the cloth. Some leaves worked better than others. I thought the ferns would be interesting because they have so many tiny leaves, but they did not turn out as well as the
Sweet Gum Leaf,



Wild Grape,


and Clovers.


The one question I was asked a couple times today was, " can you wash it without the colors coming out?" I don't know the answer to that yet, because I haven't tried, but I'll add the answer to that after it goes through it's first wash.

Update 3/28/09 10:35 p.m. - The T-shirt has now had it's first washing and it turned out fine, all the plant prints are still there. I did turn it inside out before washing, just in case, and I didn't use any bleach.


Blaze learned another new skill this week. After years of trying to get him to swing without being pushed to get started, suddenly this week, he just started doing it. He's been very proud of himself and has spent lots of time on the swing, so much time, in fact, that last night he complained that his back felt like it was still swinging long after he had stopped and come into the apartment.

King Equals Meets the Math Gnomes

It was time to introduce King Equals to the math gnomes, but he's supposed to be dressed all in royal purple and I didn't have any purple felt and didn't feel like waiting for a piece of mail-ordered felt to arrive. The solution was to make it myself. I used the last of the blue acid dye powder from the tie dyed t-shirt we made two weeks ago and mixed it with packages of unsweetened cherry Kool-aid. I don't think I could reproduce this process again it I tried, but it did work.



I dyed some wool roving and then used the instructions from The Art of Feltmaking, by Anne Einset Vickrey, for making flat felt in a plastic bag.












Here are more useful links for math gnome stories:

http://waldorfjourney.typepad.com/a_journey_through_waldorf/2008/07/the-four-proces.html


http://www.oakmeadow.com/curriculum/overviews/1_Web_Overview.pdf

Unplugged Challenge:Wrinkle (tie dye T-shirt)

This week's Unplugged Challenge theme at "Unplug Your Kids" was "Wrinkle", so I taught Blaze how to twist and wad-up a T-shirt to tie dye it.
I just learned this twisting technique a couple weeks ago, so this was my first time trying it as well. Before this, I had always just tied string or rubber bands wherever I didn't want the dye to touch the fabric, but the teenage boy I tutor in the afternoons, took me into his art class to show me how they were doing the spiral designs, after I admired the T-shirt he had made in class and asked him how it was done.




Start by pinching a spot of fabric in the middle of the front of the T-shirt and twist.




After the T-shirt has been twisted into a tight spiral, hold it in that shaped using 2 or 3 rubber bands. (That's pretty wrinkled)




We used blue and black acid dyes, because that was what we had on-hand. If I do this again I'm going to make the colors more contrasting and mix them stronger, so that the colors are darker.

There are 2 ways that the art class used to add their dyes to the shirts. They had some of their dyes in squirt bottles and some in bowls that they dipped the shirts into. We tried both, but I think Blaze liked the squirt bottle best.






We really drenched our shirt with dye, but it's not necessary to be so heavy-handed. Leaving some spots of white will add more detail to the design and brighten up the shirt.



Then we rinsed it in cool water until the water ran clear and dried it.

The dark colors made a fairly subtle spiral design.

Batik

This post, in part, appeared on my old blog in January (Blaze's hair was a lot shorter then). At that time, our computer was not working and I was having trouble downloading pictures on the library computer I was using, so I am going to try this again with the pictures that I had to leave out then.


We used the silk and Kool-aid to do batiking . I made a scarf and Blaze designed and dyed a flag for his own imaginary world.



First I drew the design I wanted on a big piece of paper.



Then I placed the silk over the paper, so that I could see the design through the cloth. The designs were then painted onto the fabric using a mixture of melted wax and beeswax and an old paint brush.





I used Black Cherry Kool-aid for this one, but found it to be the least color-fast of the flavors I've tried so far.



After dying, the fabric was streamed for 20 minutes. I'll warn you that the steaming with the wax on the silk means wax to clean out of the pan and streamer later.

After the silk is dry, sandwich it between two layers of paper and iron the wax out of the cloth. Ironing makes the wax melt and the paper absorbs it. A couple layer of paper may be need both under and above the cloth, so the wax doesn't get on the ironing board cover or the iron.





Then it was Blaze's turn:

He wanted to make a flag. He came up with the design idea, but I helped it along a little by making the posterboard star stencils and helping him to trace around a large plate, as the planet in the middle of the flag. He did the small details on his own.





He carefully painted the wax on, while I made sure that the wax stayed melted.



We used both blue and green Kool-aid as dye.



When the flag had been steamed and ironed, we tied it to a bamboo pole and it was ready to display or play with.

The Flag of Blaze World:

Kool Aid is Cool Again

My mother always had Kool-Aid in the house when I was growing up. She couldn't afford to have us drink juice every time we got thirsty, but Kool Aid was cheap. The first money I ever earned was probably from a Kool Aid stand and Kool Aid was what I used to bribe the neighbor kids into mowing the lawn, which was supposed to be my chore. But, I don't want my own children to have that much sugar and artificial color, so I hadn't bought Kool Aid for years, until I discovered Kool Aid as a dye. Kool Aid, it turns out, is a fruity smelling, child safe dye for any fiber that comes from animals. This means wool, mohair, silk, and human hair ( although not over dark colored hair).

Just before Christmas last year, I got the greatest deal I could ever imagine at a thrift store. An entire bolt of cream colored silk for $4.25!



So, starting right after Christmas, my obsession became Kool Aid. I checked all of our local stores for exciting flavors, but found that only one store had a good selection. If you are in Florida, the best Kool Aid selection is at Sweetbay.
Here is what I collected:



The first step in this process is to soak the silk in warm water with a splash of vinegar added. I cut off 1 yard of fabric for each of these projects.



Next, mix unsweetened Kool Aid powder with hot water (ratio:1/2 cup of water to each pack of Kool Aid)
I had read that for dying wool yarn that the ratio of wool to Kool Aid was 1 ounce of wool to 1 pack of Kool Aid, so I weighed my silk piece before trying this. My silk was 27 inches by 36 inched and weighed 1.7 ounces, but I found that it took 2 packs per ounce to get a good color.
I used old peanut butter jars to mix the colors, because I could shake them, but I think something bigger should be used for the actual dying, because the fabric being squished into the jars made the colors come out uneven.





After the cloth has soaked up most of the color from the Kool Aid water, the silk will need to be streamed for about 20 minutes to set the color. I did this right in the peanut butter jars by setting them in a large pot with some water in the bottom.



The blue turned out very uneven, so I gave it a second dye bath in green and I really like the effect. It looks very intentional. I used a mixing bowl to mix the green and dye the cloth and the bigger bowl did help.





Rinse the fabric in clean cool water until the water comes out clear. Then hang the fabric up to dry, but don't let two different colors touch, like I did, because the brighter color will bleed onto the other a little.

Once you iron the cloth and finish off any fraying edges, you have beautiful fabric to sew with or as playsilks for children. Blaze claimed the red one before I even had the hem sewn.



ooooh, scary pirate!

I also tried a piece of tie dyed silk.

Rubber bands borrowed from Blaze's GeoBoard