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.
