Dyeing leather gloves

2019-Oct-18, Friday 12:40 am
The gloves were an adventure. I eventually found a promising pair of gloves roughly the right style, and in a pale enough shade that they might take a colour. These also didn't mention any waterproofing coatings, so I gave them a try.

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Dyed gloves
Photo by [personal profile] chebe

Customising jeans

2019-Oct-17, Thursday 12:25 pm
The other half of the overalls is the trousers. I found some wide-legged white jeans, on sale, claiming to be 100% cotton. Grabbed a couple of pods of Dylon's All-in-1 machine dye in Deep Violet, and had at. It's one pod to 600g fabric. The trousers need to be three different colours so I cut the legs off just below the knees. That left about 500g of jeans to become dark purple. I put them in the machine with one and a half pods (and a pair of gloves).

Details )



Customised jeans, finished, flat
Photo by [personal profile] chebe

Normally when I dye fabric I just dump the powder and salt in the washing machine and let the chemistry and engineering do what they do best. But it's wasteful, especially when all you want to dye is one or two t-shirts. So I decided to dip my toe into the domain of hand-dye.

I had two fine white cotton t-shirts to hand; one with blue and red print on the front and black on the back, the other with green and orange print on the front and black on the back. Clearly what they needed was purple. (I have been accused of thinking everything needs to be more purple, but see nothing wrong with this.) I found a nice dark, deep, "Intense Violet" colour. Perfection.

Perhaps doing it at the hackerspace was a mistake. There were many people to help, but largely it resulted in distraction and mass mis-reading of the instructions. We did it 'wrong'; you're supposed add the dye-water to the salt-water! But, t-shirts got dyed, so it can't have been that wrong.

Pictures )

But, they're still cotton t-shirts, so there's no problem with trying again. And the coverage is nice and even, I especially like how even the gaps in-between the printed bits took the colour just as well. Maybe I'll get a better colour next time, if you know, I actually follow the instructions. But there will be more modding of these t-shirts first. Like adding of waists, and maybe lowering the necklines. Though that's a task for another day!