Jun 7, 2011

Wool Dying at Home

The other day we did some wool dying with Anna. We are going to make some wet felted earrings to sell on this years Exit Festival and since I only have natural sheep wool at home,we needed some colors.
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We used simple fabric dye for coloring the wool. The trick is,you need to add a table spoon of salt to the water before adding the wool. We cooked every color for about 25 minutes and left the wool soaking in the jars for a whole night.
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This is what the colors looked like after cooking.
Now,here is another trick I am going to tell you. After we left the wool soaking the hole night,we washed every color in cold water in wich we added a cup of vinegar.
The vinegar helps preserve the bright colors and they won't wash or fade out from our future projects.
After washing the wool with clear,cold water again I left them out to dry on the sun.
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You always need your freshly dyed wool to dry completly before using it for any project.
We used up some older dyed wool to make a few tiny balls wich we will turn in to earrings later.
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Here is a before and after picture of the wool.
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I did some wet felting the other weekend,the result is two bags,a wallet and a cell phone pouch. These will also be on sale at the Exit Festival.
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I promise to show more detailed pictures in my next post.I'm going to work on my crochet bag now.
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4 comments:

  1. Your talent never ceases to amaze me! You're gonna rock at this year's festival!

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  2. Thats really old school yet very awesome!! :D

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  3. Wow those bags are lovely. The embroidery on the front really makes them :)

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  4. I love your wet felted bags! They will sell like sliced bread, and I ebvy the future owners.
    And thank you for the tips on wool dyeing, they will come in very handy one day (hopefully soon)!

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