Dye Job

Briana loves her fashion and is starting to ask more and more sophisticated questions about clothing construction. The one that we’re going to answer today is about how to get the colors on the clothes. I asked her how she thinks the colors get on the clothes and she said “crayons”. Not the drawings of clothes, real clothes. Then she says, “You just buy them whatever color you want.”

I explain that you dye the fabric by getting something that has color on it and transferring that color to your fabric. Then I tell them that one way to get colors is to start in nature.

FYI, this is definitely an outdoor activity!

I get some loose red tea and let the kids put some on a paper towel for themselves.

 

Then I tell them to spray the leaves and see what happens. As they do it I explain that the water will strip the color from the leaves and put it on the porous paper. The paper will soak up the color.

As the kids watch their Bounty paper turn pink, I hold mine up so that they can see the pink water travel down the paper on it’s own.

Then we do the same thing with black tea to see the paper turn brown. With the red tea we talked about how the water pushes the color out. With the black tea, I use soaked tea bags (instead of loose tea and a water sprayer) and I emphasize that it is the pressure of our hands that pushes the color out.

The kids color their paper towels pink and brown.

You might notice that Briana is holding onto socks. We’ll get there. She refused to relinquish the socks until we did.

I tell the kiddies that lots of things in nature will give up their color if we wet them or push on them and I challenge the kids to find something colorful in the backyard. We start with leaves.

If you wad up the leaves and push, they will give up their green color to our paper. We verify the hypothesis. It’s serious business to Abby.

Then we get blueberries off of our blueberry plant. They make a rich fuchsia color (Bree’s favorite!) when rubbed on the paper (or when soaked in the water as we discover later).

I never throw anything away. Including unmatched socks, because those matches have to be somewhere in the house – it’s the law of conservation of mass! So when we started talking about dying fabrics I immediately thought of using them. We went to my pile of socks that have lost their match and picked four out, one for each of us, including Daddy who joins in the fun.

My husband takes the sock dying process very seriously.

We use all kinds of things found in nature to design our own socks and dye them.

Briana discovers that if she’s careful, she can use the red tea to dye around the hearts on her socks, and the blueberries to dye some of the hearts to create her design.

Abby discovers that if she puts the blueberries in water with a little tea, she can put her whole sock in and make it pink uniformly.

I like a combination of grass, black tea, and blueberries on my sock.

Matt likes to use the blueberries and black tea as stamps to create a pattern.

We all have a blast enjoying a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the backyard! Now maybe when Briana grows up to be a fashion designer, like she is planning right now, she’ll be innovative in her thinking about dyeing fabrics and pattern creation.

One day you will all dye to have one of her designs!

<3 Pedigreed Housewife