Adventures in Dip-Dyeing

Hello, there!  I've spent the last few days trying my hand at some dip-dyeing, and I'm so excited to share what I came up with!  This recent dyeing experiment came out of a valiant, if vastly unsuccessful attempt to right a pair of my sister's pants that had been quite wronged by some hand sanitizer.  By that, of course, I mean that she tried to remove some tree sap from her pants with hand sanitizer.  While it took out the sap brilliantly, it also seeped through to the front of the pants and caused some massive bleach stains (oopsies!)  Of course, my first response was "don't even worry about it, we can dye them" only to realize that bleach stains don't really want to be any color than white (or really, some gross yellowish variation of actual white.)  After employing many creative (read: ridiculous and very messy, even for an outside project) dyeing techniques, I threw in the towel (or pants: I literally threw the whole pair of pants in my dyeing bucket in an effort to unify the color, to no avail) and moved on to Plan B, which was dying some lace to match the pants, cutting the stains out of the pants, and adding the lace behind the holes.  We'll just have to see what happens with hair-brained scheme #2.

However, the real up-side to this dyeing disaster was that the pants in question are a great coral color, which I matched by mixing two boxes of Rit dye: magenta and orange.  It seemed such a shame to make a whole batch of dye for just a little bitty stain, so I planned a few projects, picked up come unbleached cotton, and had a blast experimenting with dip-dyeing.  For the most part, I just dipped parts of the pieces into the dye, leaving the other portions white.  For a few pieces (once I had some confidence in my dipping skills, really) I folded the fabric to make stripes, which I'm pretty proud to say actually look like stripes.  I've been making my way through the dyed pieces, cutting lining pieces to match and sewing them into little pouches, wallets, and bags, and I have just a few to share with you today.  

These four pouches were the simplest of my planned dip-dyed projects, so I started with them.  I interfaced all of the dyed pieces, cut linings from some great metallic prints I found at JoAnn Fabrics, and just added a 9-inch zipper to each to make some simple pouches.  I have been meaning to try a half-circle pouch for a while, and I love how they came out!  The only thing missing from these little pouches is a great zipper pull.  I'm thinking…tassels?  Maybe a little pull made out of lace?  So many possibilities!

In other news, I'm working up a simple photo tutorial on how to make your very own zippered pouches.  They've really become one of my go-to projects…they're simple, quite quick to whip up, and leave lots of room for customization (the world is your oyster with this kind of simple project template.)  I hope to have that up tomorrow, so stay tuned!

I spent the rest of the weekend doing lots of running, practicing, spending time with my sister, and of course, with this guy.

  I hope your weekends were as lovely and relaxing as mine was.