Wednesday was dyeing day for the monthly sewing group. Diane has a nifty shed that is a good place to do messy work. The big shirt I soaked in a soda ash solution, wrapped diagonally around a 4" plastic pipe, attached with rubber bands, scrunched together, and added dye in wide lines. The small shirt I had completed before and thought it was colorless, so I redyed it after soaking it and tieing it up with rubber bands.
These two photos are from the same dyeing process. We used gallon ice cream buckets, scrunched shirts into a layer, added soda ash solution to wet everything, and then poured on dye. The top photo is the bottom layer. The other t-shirts were other layers to fill the bucket. Let the dye work into the fibers for 24-48 hours or more. Then you are ready to see the results. It was a fantastic fun day!
Addition: After rinsing two buckets of shirts and several single shirts that were each in a plastic bag, I have noticed that the bucket shirts absorb almost all of the dye. There is very little color when I rinse those shirts. The shirts we soaked quickly in soda ash solution and then gathered with rubber bands before adding the dye needed much rinsing because there was a lot of dye not absorbed. I find that interesting.
1 comment:
Interesting observation about absorption of the dye. Glad you had a good time.
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