Happy Dyes

This week I headed out with my two youngest children to my friend Patti's farm.  She and I spent 4 hours dying silk ribbons.  She totally rocked it at getting wonderful natural looking landscape colors from solid pastel ribbons.  LOOK!

beautiful!!

Here is EVERYTHING we dyed.  We hung the heat-set ribbons on her wooden metre stick.   : )

...and Patti at Her Sweet Prairie : )

What a great collection!  Those frosty silver blues are fabulous too.  There's bronze.  There's apricot.  There's celery.  yum yum yum.  I still can't believe it was four hours.  My kids fed the horses, adventured, and caught grasshoppers by the handful.

(***Oh crap - I just remembered there is a bucket full still in my living room!!)

I have to tell you about this thrift store silk.  I found a pink 100% silk skirt for $7.  It was mid-calf length, and pleated!  You know what that means?  I took it home and cut off the waist.  The rest of the skirt suddenly unfolded like an accordion.  There must have been 4 metres of silk that was nearly one a metre wide.  What a score!  I cut some strips off and we tried dying that - like the sari silk ribbon.

I didn't love this at first, but once we got home, I thought I'd try a bit more.  This could be really useful with hooking.  I took out the jars of dyes and did a bit more.

Then I made some a little darker still... more antique colors.

That was fun.  It really takes no time at all to dye ribbons.  There's hardly any mess.  The problem was that we just couldn't stop.  ; )  I hope you enjoyed it Patti!  It was really nice to have some company doing this.  I am so happy.  More natural colored ribbons means more natural looking work I think.

Have a great weekend!  And again, thank you Patti!  I hope you stitch a little something with the lovelies we made.

* * * So for all you asking, we used Jaquard Dye-Na-Flo, water, and some Jaquard Lumiere acrylics (with water) for the sparkle.  We mixed both products in little glass bowls and then stored them in sealer jars.  They are non toxic and clean up easy.  Some of my products were purchased through local art stores that unfortunately aren't around anymore.  You can get them at Art Placement in Saskatoon, Colours accross Canada (except for Saskatoon), and you can also get them from Meinke Toy (a great resource for all fibre art - see the link on my sidebar to the right).  They happen to sell sari-silk already hand dyed and ready to go.  It is one of my favorite products from them. ; )  You can get any color of silk ribbon from Ribbonsmyth (see the link on the sidebar).