Disappointing Dyeing

I was less than pleased with the children's last lot of dyeing when it emerged from the washing machine. No fault of theirs. They were given supplementary instructions (not my be me, the dog, but by someone barking themselves.) They were told to secure their tied fabric with lots of plastic bands and make it as tight as possible. The tighter it was, the better it would be. Wrong. The tighter it is, the more difficult it is for the dye to penetrate resulting in a greater percentage of dirty white.

This is the first time that I've been delighted that children quite often don't do what they are told and some of the batch was quite acceptable.

I has been decided to over dye one quarter of each class room's output so the four groups in each class can have a different colourway. This dyeing disaster gave me a chance to experiment with a bit of over dyeing, albeit rashly and without much forethought. (Yes, that sound like the kind of thing I'd do.)

I decided to over dye this group's yellow fabric which weren't very yellow. I squished them all into a cut off water bottle and submerged them under some yellow dye solution. Then it dawned on me that this will kill all the white and they might look a bit odd. Errr, ummm, yes...right enough.

Sooooooooo, for the official over dyeing session I've decided both to tie (but not too tightly) and to squish in order to retain some of the white.