I did a little dyeing...



So, I did a little dyeing on the weekend.

..... curious?



This blanket (above) at one point in its life used to be white with pink detailing but that was over 30+ years ago!  This is my old blanket from when I was a child, it was old back then having been 'demoted' to the mattress to be used a mattress protector rather than as a blanket but now that bubba Joe has his own bed, we are in need of single bed blankets.  I was diving through the back of the cupboard looking for single bed sheets when I found this. Erk was my original opinion, it had yellowed with age but then whammo, an idea - I've been hankering to dye something lately (I don't know why!) so I dragged bubba Joe off to the store & let him chose a colour, he chose this Parrot Amazon Green.

So I grabbed the dye packet & read the instructions. Huh, this packet only dyes one business short, are they serious? I wasn't heading back to the store to buy 3 more packs so I just decided to use it & see how it went. Going on to read the instructions, it stated that I had to soak the 'shirt' first then put it in a tub of warm water then dissolve the dye with more warm water & add some salt. I was then to stir it into the soaked shirt & stir for 15 minutes then keep going back & stirring it for another 45mins... what???  No way!!

So, I emptied my washing machine which is a front loader, tossed in the blanket, tossed in the dye, tossed in the salt & shut the washing machine door. I then started it on a hot wash cycle & made sure not to let the machine rinse. I then turned the machine off half way through the cycle for 20mins or so then turned it back on for a few minutes then turned it off & repeated this a few times then I let it finish the cycle & hung my green blanket up to dry!  Here is the result, whilst it's not the bright green shown on the packet, it's not bad!





Want to see what the before & after side by side?

So, what did I learn?  I learnt that it was fun and not to be afraid to give it ago, especially when the garment wasn't being used & didn't matter if the dye failed.  I have some yarn in an awful colour, I'm thinking of hitting that with some dye soon too!

Do you dye? Have you dyed?  Is there something that needs to be dyed? If you want to use the same dye, you can get some here....

Oh, the basket at the top of the blog post has nothing to do with dyeing, I just emptied it out & it will soon be full of yarn - it was just prettier to have at the top than my old ratty basket!