Saturday, April 23, 2011

Low water immersion dyeing

As a family we eat about 5 (organic whole wheat) loafs of bread a week. Those 5 bread come in plastic breadbags and I keep those bags for second use. We all take our bread in breadboxes, so those bags accumulate. Last night I did need a breadbag, so I looked in the closet and found two breadbags filled with breadbags. That is a ridiciulous amount of breadbags, and I still had a lot of white fabric and a lot of mixed dye, so I decided to do some "low water immersion dyeing", which took me all morning.  This are the fabrics I dyed:





This is what I learned:
  1. It might environmentally more friendly to use recycled breadbags, it is not advisable, because almost all bags leak, resulting in a terrible mess.
  2. Plastic bags melt if you microwave them too long.
  3. I meant to make series of different colours, but because I added the dye directly to the fabric without mixing it first, the colours didn't mix properly and I eded up with four series of quite similar looking fabrics.
  4. Because of the leaky breadbags, I couldn't squeeze the bags properly which caused quite uneven distribution of the dye which resulted in quite busy fabrics.

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