Saturday, March 29, 2014

Into The Dye Pot

Into The Dye Pot

I've been cutting and listing new lots of pennies in my Etsy shop. 
Finding that I had some slow sellers inspired me to pull out the dye pot. 
 I had a jar of onion skin dye that was lingering in the back of my fridge.
First things first; 
 how I made that onion skin dye following my friend Cee's method.
Stuff a slow cooker full of collected onion skins, all colours.  
Cee recommends a slow cooker that you don't cook in.
Fill with water and cook on low overnight.
Here my finished batch of dye.

Then the fun part!

I mixed equal parts water and onion skin dye
  in my large dye pot and added these pennies,
 hundreds of them, but not the whole box....about 3/4 of it,
 notice the rogue green....it was a good "bleeder"!  
Dyeing in my kitchen is not very scientific. But it is an experience!

After stirring on and off for about 15 minutes
 I added a couple glugs of vinegar and a couple tablespoons of salt, 
both to set the dye. 
Stirred well and let it rest for a couple hours.

It didn't take long for the water to become almost clear, the dye was absorbed.
At this point I rinsed and rinsed, squished out the water, 
spun them in my washer to remove most of the water
 and dried my new penny stash in the dryer.
But not for long, just a few minutes. 
It depends on how much moisture I had removed from the spin cycle, 
 I didn't want them to become too fluffy.  
Again...not very scientific.

I straightened and stacked them while they were damp. 
And have now packaged 1.5 inch and 1 inch in bags of 50 for you in my Etsy shop!


 Then I went back to the dye pot this morning and made a batch of
 1 part onion skin dye to 10 parts water.
Tossed in this penny batch with some uncut, yellow, green and glue wool pieces...


 See... after adding vinegar and salt, stirring well and letting the batch rest for a few hours,
 the dye is all absorbed and the water is clear!
 Rinse and squish squish...

Look what a difference a bath in onion skin dye will make!
I'll be listing these later in my shop and mixing some into my mixed bags on Etsy.
There you can find mixed bags of sizes 9/16", 3/4", 1" and 1.5"

What a fun morning!

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