Dipped Sweater

I am still working on props for that play, and we needed a pillow dyed orange and maroon. Well, why waste some perfectly good dye when I have a plain old vanilla sweater just aching for a make-over? This might be looking a ahead more to fall BUT i had the dye NOW so you do what you can yeah?

The Original

The Orange Dye

The Maroon Dye

Since I had the maroon in a bottle of dye rather than a box, I had more control on how much I used and I knew I wouldn't need much. So I poured about 3 TB in to this 2 c. pyrex and filled the rest with hot water. Then I commenced the dipping.

Now I am sure there is a proper way to be doing this that you can look up online etc. but I had...six more props i needed to complete in about 4 hours so I didn't exactly have time to research properly. My bad. So what I did was 1) think about how far up I wanted color to go and then 2) dipped the sleeves in to that height, let it sit for a bit, about 5 min.  and then pulled it out, so that there was more of a progression of color, rather than a solid line of it. Since I wanted that brighter I let it sit for 15 min. I did the same thing with the base of the sweater.

Then I added the maroon.

For the maroon, I only wanted an accent, so I dipped the sweater just over the cuff on both sleeves and the base. I didn't let this sit in the dye too long, but i did wait to rinse it. Sweaters are really absorbent so the color stayed in the knit without me having to keep it in the dye. This also made rinsing take a reeeeaaaallllyy looooong time. Just as a heads up.

When you rinse, keep in mind that the dye is going to get all over the rest of the sweater unless you are very careful about how you rinse it, doing it in chunks and keeping it segregated so the color doesn't go whee you don't want it too. I also found that when sticking items in the dryer rather than letting them sit to dry, the color will travel onto other regions of the clothing. I was ok with this, and considering my time schedule I didn't have all afternoon to be super picky about it anyway. I think it turned out all right in the end :)