Confetti Dyeing

The other day while perusing my favorite blogs I came upon Gayle's blog post at The Middle Sister.  Among the eye candy of projects being worked on saw someone's confetti dye job.  So that made me want to share with my readers how they too can do it.

Actually the last time I dyed with snippets was back in 2011 (just checked my blog archives) but I've gained some new followers so maybe this will be new to some of you. Here were those results on a pink piece of wool and a white piece of wool.  Picture doesn't look right so maybe I didn't use a flash.

This time decided to use a piece of beige wool skirt.  You can sprinkle the snippets on a damp or wet piece of wool. But starting with wet wool is always best to be sure the wool is completely saturated with water. You can squeeze out the bulk but at least the core of the wool would be wet.  My snippet jar was in need of emptying anyway so thought it a great time for a tutorial.

While spreading the snippets it was fun to see the ends which were snipped off the end of a loop for various rugs I'd hooked.  Some wool in there were back to last September when I was hooking Nantucket Broom Ride.

Next you would roll up the piece or pieces of wool and tie it together.  I used the selvage of some cotton fabric which I keep in the laundry room for such things.

Then into a pot of water with a mild detergent (without bleach) to bleed out the dye in the snippets.  I simmered this for maybe 15 minutes, then put a glug of white vinegar in the pot and continued simmering another 15 minutes.

The pot then went from kitchen stove to laundry room wash tub for the heat to drop then hand squeezed the water from the roll.  The roll was then taken outside, untie and free the snippets to be available for any birds who needed fill in a nest.

This is the inside roll result.  There's a little color and the dark browns added a nice touch since I do primitives.

And below is the outside of the roll.  You can tell because the left edge is rather bland since there were no snippets on the outside of the rolled wool.

This was fun to do again and think this tan wool may be used in something in the future.  Thanks Gayle, and your friend for inspiring me to do this again.

So if there are any of you wanna-be-a-dyers out there, this would be a good fun experiment.  This and always the marrying of wool to get a primitive dark or other colors.  

Hope you had a good Monday everyone.  Now I'm going back to hooking daffodils.

Saundra