Cookin to dye for!

I have a skirt made out of muslin but apparently Esmeralda's skirt isn't natural colored!

What is a girl to do? Well into the kitchen with me.
I have this awesome electric kettle since I love to drink tea. It is much easier to boil small amounts of water in this than large amounts on the stove. To dye lots of fabric you need space. Over a year ago I got this notion that I really wanted to can my own jellies and such. More on that another day. To dye you need a very very large pot and preferably one you don't ever intend to put food in. Lucky me I have this!

So to start I boiled about 48 cups of water and added it to the large pot and kept it at a simmer. Then to use powder dye I need to dissolve it in water before adding to the dye bath.  I had 2 open packages of royal blue powder dye and 1 open package of purple powder dye from dying my 'magic skirt'. I decided to use the remainder of all 3 of these

I have this plastic container I no longer use to hold food. So i can use it for dissolving the dye into hot water. Whenever working with dye (especially concentrated dye) it is important to wear gloves.

The package holding the powder dye has tons of directions 

In those instructions it says I first need to wet the fabric with hot water. I also added a bit of laundry detergent since I didn't exactly wash the fabric before messing with it. 

 



It also says to add salt to the dye bath, 1 cup of it for 3 gallons. I now need to get more salt.

 In addiction to dying the skirt I realized that the scarf should be a very similar color and considering all the water and dye I was using already I added a bit of wine colored liquid dye to the mix (about 3 oz worth) after I had finished with the skirt.

However to dye the scarf I needed a scarf.
On the left you can see that I used my serger (with black thread) to serge this strip of fabric about 60" long. Then I turned it inside out (on the right). I figure once I add the coins it should hang properly.

mmm yummy. This is the scarf in the pot.

The more blueish fabric is the skirt the more purple is the scarf. Both these pictures are when they are wet. Th one on the left right after they have been rinsed until the water runs clear then wrung out. To the right is after a day of sitting in my sink. If they don't dry completely in a day or so I guess I'll throw them in the dryer.   

 


Both colors are significantly darker than I expected but we'll see if I can work with it when it is dry.

If not I may just start over!