Cotton Fabric Dyeing 101

hi I'm Jennifer Ackerman hey way from fresh sanity calm and today I'm going to continue to give you some ideas of what you can do to make bloopers to leave on these craft sanity hot older looms recently we did a video where we show you how to cut up old t-shirts and make bloopers and this is really fun when you have a lot of colorful shirts that you don't they're stretched out or you just they're just you know that the past sub-prime but the problem comes in though when you have like a shirt like this that's kind of a little kind of gross and discolored and you want to figure out something else to do with it what we're going to do today is throw those in a dye pot and it's kind of cool because there's a lot of there are a lot of dyes available in the commercial market there and in your local craft store and also some big-box stores I know our local Meijer carries some of these products I've worked with the tulip brand before this will be my first experience with this kind of dye but they all work pretty much the same and I try to do these pretty fast and loose like just throw in the salt throw in the dye I do I did heat up the water on the stove you want to be careful if you're going to do this with kids usually what I do is I heat up the the water get it out to where it's going to be and then bring the kids into the mix you're not tripping and scolding your child and then the looper fund just goes out the door because now you're in the emergency room so we want to try to avoid that part so we're going to do today is just dump these things in we're these five colors we're going to die t-shirts I'm also going to be dyeing some tea towel fabric and just just basically any kind of neutral colored stuff I could find that I wanted to just kind of throw in here so they do say on the package that you should use rubber gloves um I do most of the time but not always so far nothing terrible's happened but it is good it specially if you're working with kids uh dress them in clothes that are you know you're okay with them getting ruined and put on some rubber gloves so alright let's get started with this I'm gonna just open these I've already added the salt and I think some of these can just open and this is supposed to be an aqua which is one of my favorite colors and we're going to do some yellow as well mrs. flamingo pink which seems interesting so I saw some flamingos at the Toledo Zoo recently and they are actually like work so this whole flamingo pink stuff another pink flamingos but I didn't get to see those and this red is coming me trouble because red you know what happens with bread usually washes out a little bit we'll see how that goes this is a goldfish Orange this dial on brand I like the names of their dyes and you like that very very fun alright now I'm going to mix these up and I'm going to kind of let that dissolve a little bit you can dip from one to the other and I'm not gonna lie I've done that before I'm like a reckless craft or sometimes at night I didn't realize that until I start doing these videos and I'm like yeah I don't know what's follow all the steps but the thing is though if you're going between colors especially like a blue to yellow you're gonna have green and you don't want to do that so just take the time to just wipe off your you're stirring utensil and give yourself a chance to keep those colors pretty true another thing on to mention too I like to make a lot of soup I would never make soup in these pots because these are the pots I use for dyeing I also make I do some soap projects but I would never make food and anything that I have used to you that I've use any kind of chemical dye keep it keep it safe and use use something buy a cheap set of pots from just you know you can go to like um I think I went to I don't remember where exactly I got these you can go to Goodwill you can go to a thrift store you could go to just any place it sells like a really low budget set of pots and get those I'm going to let this dissolve for a little bit and probably stir it again and then we're going to throw stuff it get set with the dying okay we've let the dye dissolve and these pots and now we're going to get started adding to fabric now the first thing you put in is going to absorb the most vibrant color so usually you know just throw in whatever you want to be the darkest I don't really care I just have a pile of old shirts that I'm going to throw in here and then I'm going to get some lighter gradations with some of the scrap fabric behind me here so we're just going to start throwing some things in and you can use your you can kind of push it down and you can see like some of it I mean it soaks it up right away and actually you know what I've done in the past is I've actually soaked the fabric in the past and I'm going to do that with these little scraps behind me but these I'm just going to throw in and see we'll just throw them in and see what happens yeah I take a lot of photography have your camera nearby because I love to take pictures of Wow this read now we'll see how much of that washes out but that is like a nice read how much can you expect to wash out just two pens Reds just reds typically wash out there's a lot of I don't know why but Reds tend to to wash out but that looks like that's going to be pretty dark and I like that blue and I've done things where you can get kind of an ombre if you don't want to have the whole thing be dyed or you can die the whole thing put the whole thing in and then pull it out so it's so it's it's darker at the bottom but if you were going to do something like that you can dip it in and then just kind of clip it to the side and those kind of things are fun okay what I'm going to notice is as as I keep adding fabric things are going to get progressively you're going to get lighter so the fabric is going to start absorbing less well it won't be absorbing less it'll just be they'll be less pigment in the water see how that wasn't taking all the day so I'm going to push that in some white spots on there trying to just get push that down and make sure I'm getting those and I'm using these are this is tea towel fabric from ACS home and work ACS sponsors my craft sanity podcast and I like to print on this fabric from a printmaking isolate to embroider on it and I really like to die this fabric as well it takes a dive really nicely and if you do this with a group of people it's kind of nice you can assign one person to each color which is really fun because then you can get these things mixed in really fast so having a little party where you everyone brings t-shirts and fabric to die is really fun I did that with my Weavers Guild one time and that was really fun and then you have more pots to work with as well you don't have to have xx yourself you can have everyone bring a couple this is definitely an outdoor project we're doing this on the deck for a reason because if the spills no problem okay I'm thinking I can get a little bit more end but I'm going to be getting close to my threshold before I have to move things out and usually I do two waves I do I fill it up and then I pull them out kind of run some I'll show you how ideas for rinsing hang them up to dry and then I use I reload the pots again with another round of fabric and that always comes out lighter but I like it because it's the same color family and please work they play well together the colors because you have just the gradation that happens and I made a quilt recently the last quilt I made was made with all fabric that I just tea-towel flour sakti fell fabric that I had died I want to say I did it in the fall or in the summer last year and I kind of had it sitting in a vintage suitcase for a long time and finally had an inspiration to do a project and it was really fun to just work with some solids that I had kind of created myself and you're probably wondering like geez maybe she should have put this up on a table looks kind of uncomfortable I'll admit it it is a little uncomfortable to be down here during the stuff but the reason why I didn't put it up higher is because if there's any kind of accident where you accidentally tips it over these cannot these are on the ground right there on the deck so the chances of someone getting burned or having an accident reduced so that's why I do some of these kind of strange moves here okay I'm thinking I can get really get couple more pieces into each of those okay so I'm going to rent these now and it's raining on my back duct so I'm going to do this quickly and actually this is the part you should use you should this the part where I actually do follow the rules and use gloves all right so I started the lightest colored first and you squeeze out as much as you can out of it and then I just throw it in here this is just cold water and there will be some color that will come out that when I didn't do a very good job of sweet huh although okay so I'm just getting given it some time to uh and if you if I had more time I sometimes I'll put to clean water like have one that's the first water bath and I have another one but I'm going to just let this I mean I'm just going to dry this and since it's the latest color I'm going to put it up at the top and this is just the regular laundry drying rack here and I actually only use this when I'm doing my fabric dyeing so that doesn't look like it was very evenly distributed there and throw that one back in it's a little splashy to me part got missed so I'm going to put that back in there and then I do I wash everything so it's going to get washed again and dried so before you sew it into something you wanna make sure it's colorfast otherwise that could be a problem especially if it's a gift for somebody okay now I got myself into a situation here let's see alright this is a really good project to do in the middle the summer when it's hot and you can get the most out of that and use the Sun to help you out with the drying process and okay so as you can see there's quite a bit of yellow that came out and I'm going to actually still use this to die again some more stuff and that one looks like it's just going to be splotchy that's how it's going to be alright overall I'm pretty happy with how this came out usually I try to like rinse it out and you can change your color out in between each one Mississippi's let's see how its draining out pretty clear it's coming out clear when you wring it out when it's pretty clear then you know you've got enough most of the dye out and I'm going to wash all this again I just want to make sure when I throw it all in the wash they don't have color contamination between because I don't do a million loads of laundry okay this is the result of our dyeing experiment for the day here and as you can see with just some five packets of commercial dye from the local craft store we got quite a broad spectrum here and pretty vibrant colors the red and the pink have been to the wash already and I'll be washing everything else as the day goes on but before we lost our light we wanted to show you the results here the t-shirts are over here these are the first to go in and they picked up the color quite nicely and these are not oh totally 100% but they're primarily cotton fabric here and over here we have a mix of bleached white and natural flowers Tech tea towel fabric and this took the dye really nicely as well and you know one of the things I want to tell you guys about I use this drying rack for for dyeing projects and I like to UM I just kind of throw everything on here one things you want to be aware of is if you are going to do this at home and you're using a bunch of colors like I did you really want to designate areas for your fabric to dry because I did get some kind of drip effect because it started raining and the stuff if the fabric got wet and then dripped down and that was a little bit irritating I was able to wash most of it out but that's just something to think about you might want to designate a drying rack per color if you have the space in your house to do that or you wanted to see this old-fashioned clothesline that works for me that's actually preferred actually if you just put clothesline up and you can pin the things on pieces of fabric on you're all good to go so yeah so this was the result every time you do a dyeing project it's going to come out a little bit differently and that's one of the things I love about it so you can't predict what's going to happen exactly and for that reason I like to hear about your dyeing projects I'd like to know what kinds of fat what kind of fabric you use and what products you use what you know commercial dyes you like I'm also going to be doing some natural dyeing videos probably as the summer goes on I'd like to harvest things that are from my garden or other places I have a couple secret places that I go to find my materials so I won't tell you where I get this stuff but I'll show you what it does and so I'll be doing some videos on that and I'd like to hear just what you guys are working on and so send me some photos and comment below about what you're using and if you're interested in figuring out how to turn the once boring white t-shirts and I'm not on now guide into loopers for weaving on the craft sanity loom or your other metal potholder loom that you might have at home check the link below and we'll make sure you can find the tutorial that will show you how to do that so happy crafting folks sanity Oh sanity got sanity outs an empty

Channel: CraftSanity

Views: 95,466

Rating: 4.7063494 out of 5

Keywords: craft, tea towels, weaving, Dyeing, Cotton (Fiber), Textile (Visual Art Medium), fabric dye, hand dyed quilting fabric

Id: hh_RcUqRznI

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2015