adventures of a quilting diva

Yesterday I tried silk dying with Wilton food dyes. Quite interesting and a lot of fun. This is something you could do safely with kids and not have to worry about the toxic chemicals involved in regular acid dying. I would definitely do this again … it’s more fun than decorating cakes and calorie-free as well!

Now, I didn’t treat this as rocket science, so if you want exact proportions for a project like this you should Google something like “hand dye silk with Wilton food dye” or “hand dye wool with Wilton food dye”. I will give you a general idea here what is involved and helpful tips that I learned along the way. TIP: The process below is for protein fibers such as silk and wool. You cannot permanently dye cotton or other plant fibers or synthetics this way.

I had Wilton food dyes in Rose and Lemon Yellow in my cupboard, luckily just the colors I needed to make a pinkish-orange or an orangish-pink. TIP: If you don’t want to wear the dye on your hands for awhile, wear rubber gloves. It took a whole day to wash the dye off my hands, but my nails and the tips of my fingers where I poke them hand quilting are still dyed.

First I mixed the dyes with water and added vinegar, aiming for approximately equal parts water and vinegar. (The vinegar is what opens up the protein fibers in silk and wool, and makes them receptive to hold the dye permanently.) TIP: Mix the dyes darker than you want the final product to be.

Next I laid out a long strip of plastic wrap and put my silk cords and ribbons on top of it (prewashed in Synthrapol, rinsed and left damp for the dying.) I tried to bunch up the sides of the plastic wrap to keep the dye from spilling out. I poured the dye by teaspoonfuls on top of the cords and ribbon alternating pink and yellow.

Then I rolled up the plastic wrap and scrunched it just a bit to mix the colors a little so it wouldn’t come out in stripes. TIP: This is not enough protection for your work surface. Put a sheet of plastic or a tray underneath the plastic wrap because a little of that dye is bound to come out no matter how careful you are!

Next I rolled it up like a cinnamon bun and put it in into a glass bowl in the microwave on high for two minutes. (This is where the dyes get set, when you heat them with the vinegar.) I opened the oven and peeked inside to see if it was bubbling hot. It was, and I turned it back on for 30 seconds longer for good measure.

Here’s what it looked like when I took it out of the plastic wrap. See all that yellow dye? I probably did not mix enough vinegar in the yellow. The pink is fixed properly to the silk so it stayed soaked up in the silk. TIP: Measure the proportions of water and vinegar or your dye may run out like this!

The last step is to rinse out the excess dye. The yellow dye ran endlessly, so I finally gave it a wash in Retayne and that did the trick. The water ran clear after that. TIP: If you have Retayne, use it. If you don’t and want to experiment with hand-dying, you should probably buy it. Retayne is a great product to have on hand for hand-dying your own fabrics and threads, as well as fixing those gorgeous purchased hand-dyed fabrics and threads that are not guaranteed colorfast.

Voila! The finished product will look lighter after it dries. Luckily, this color is great and will work perfectly for me. The pink dye had enough vinegar in it to fix the yellow that mixed with it. There is a bit of orange mottled throughout with a subtle hand-dyed look. The orange doesn’t show up so well in the photo though. TIP: If the color doesn’t turn out to your liking, you can always overdye it with a different hue.

I will definitely be doing more fiber dying like this in the future. I have more of the silk cord and want to try wool yarn, as well as silk and wool fabric. (The silk I used here is pongee silk jewelry cord and crinkle silk ribbon from Cam Creations, www.silkribbon.com.)