Ribbon Dyeing

While waiting for my Artful Gathering classes to open and before the day gets too hot, I decided to do a bit of dyeing. I used coffee for papers of various kinds (no pictures of those, too boring) and Dylusion sprays for ribbon. Knowing that the Dylusion sprays are not waterproof on their own, I decided to experiment a little. Learned real quick that none of the methods that work for other dyes work with these sprays. Heat setting - nope; vinegar water - another no.
But, since the ribbons will be used for journals, it doesn't really matter. I doubt they will be immersed in water, so they should be safe.
So, here are a few pictures:

 Ribbon laid out on aluminum foil (the reason for that later) and sprayed with color randomly.

 

On both of the above, I laid the ribbon out fairly neatly and sprayed the dye on in straight lines.
And here are the results:

 

The ribbon in the top pictures is brighter, the other one more muted. I don't think I used as much color for it.
And here are a few experiments that did not quite work out:

Just a short length of ribbon, sprayed with vinegar water and the same colors as above. I obviously used too much liquid. I also scrunched the ribbon and the colors ran together and made ....... well ....... mud, green mud.

Same set up, less liquid, less scrunching, still a bit muddy. I think I'll stay away from scrunching in future.
And this is yesterday's experiment and the reason I work on aluminum foil now:

This time, I used Daler Rowney inks, beautiful bright colors, but ................ On the right is experiment 1: too much liquid, the colors ran together and I got .... yes ... mud, not terribly ugly mud, but still mud.
On the left, experiment 2: much less liquid, so the colors stayed pretty much true. BUT they faded a lot, nowhere near as bright as the color in the bottle (and I used quite a bit of ink). AND, what's even worse ............ I had worked in a plastic pan (the lid that comes with disposable foil containers) and, when I left the ribbon to dry outside in the sun (and yesterday was a very hot day), some of the plastic transferred to the ribbon. So, now there are sections of plastic coated ribbon.
On the plus side, though: Daler Rowney inks are waterproof. Something to be happy about, I suppose.

A Beginner's Junk Journal

One of the administrator's of a FB group I belong to issued a challenge to all the beginners to make a simple junk journal and she was kind enough to make videos of the process. I am just barely sliding in under the deadline, actually, my little journal (and its sisters) were finished quite a while ago, I just never took pictures. Here are pictures, finally, just of the first one I made:

The cover, it's constructed of a 9x6 envelope. I glued a pretty print-out to the front and left it at that. I'm a bit of a minimalist.

A stamped page, coffee-dyed with the corners rounded.

 A pretty glassine envelope to hold extra paper or tags.

A corner flip pocket, this one holds a tag and a journaling card.

Coffee-dyed ledger paper with a doily and a book page cut-out meant as a tuck spot for tags and journaling cards. And a coffee-dyed guest check.

A belly band holding more cards and cut-outs.

A small glassine envelope holding more tags and other pretties. Behind it is a book page.

Another corner pocket in the center of the journal. The ends of the thread have been covered with tiny cut out hearts.

More ledger paper and, on the opposite page, another doily serving as another tuck spot.

A gusseted bag I made following a tutorial on YouTube (I used a Chinese book page) holding another tag.

And another belly band and the other side of the glassine envelope. All holding tags, journaling cards and other pretties.
It was a fun project and the instructional videos were excellent.
Here is the first of the videos and the group I belong to is here.