This is the my latest Lynn hack. Which ended up wearable but did go quite badly wrong!!
I’ve been wanting to experiment with dye for a long time. I’ve dabbled in the past and my days as a student were full of endless tie-dyed charity shop buys. Now I feel inspired by Shibori techniques. Before getting involved with anything to technical I thought I would try a simple dip dye project….. Enter a plain white Lynn sweatshirt, what could go wrong?
Well it turns out its not quite as simple as it looks.
I made this Lynn in plain white French terry. To start with I washed the fabric in pure soap and then made my Lynn sweatshirt up ready for the dye process. I bought my supplies Rit dye , Rit dye fixative and some salt.
The Rit dye website has some useful tutorials and information about dip dying so I decided to follow their process.
The plan was to firstly dye the top with a pale pink followed by a royal blue leaving a shadow of pink above the blue when the top was finished. However that didn’t quite go according to plan.
I measured my water accurately which I heated to the recommended temperature, I added salt and detergent and dipped the top into the pale pink dye.
So far so good. I followed the instructions to use the fixative at this stage before rinsing until the water ran clear. I let the top dry overnight.
The next day I followed the process again this time with my blue dye. I wanted a dark blue so I did use a heavier ratio of dye to water .
I followed the rinse process again, then I washed it in the washing machine exactly as I had the day before………….and everything went blue!!
A great shade of blue exactly what I wanted but I had hoped the pink and white would remain.
The faintest shade of pink can just be seen but nothing like I had hoped for.
I would love to be able to tell you where I went wrong and how to avoid this happening, however I am slightly stumped. I was careful to follow quantities and temperatures as described and washed and washed until the water ran clear. Luckily the finished result actually looks quite good.
Even if it hadn’t worked out it wouldn’t put me off trying again. Dying fabric is fun and I am hoping to do more.
