Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Wordful Wednesday: Dyeing Playsilks

I love Waldorf-style toys, and I was very excited to find this tutorial on www.Make-Baby-Stuff.com about an inexpensive way to dye your own playsilks!

I ordered 6 plain white silks from here. I got 4 35x35 (at $3.75 each) and 2 30x30 (at $2.80 each!), thinking the smaller ones would be more manageable for my one-year-old, and my 3-year-old could use the larger ones for capes!

I prepared the vinegar soak as detailed here and put in all of the silks with a full tea kettle of hot water:

I first dyed red and green, because I only had two containers to work with.

The red dye was 2 packets of cherry Kool-Aid and one packet of Black Cherry Kool-Aid.


For the green dye, I had only 2 packets of some kind of lemon-lime Kool-Aid. MakeBabyStuff.com recommends 3, but I didn't plan ahead that far...

After about 5 minutes I took the green silk out and rinsed it, followed by the rinsing of the red silk.

I didn't plan ahead in my vinegar rationing either, and I noticed I would run out before I finished all 5 silks (I decided to leave one silk undyed, so it could be white "snow" for an igloo play set we have from Imagiplay).

To conserve vinegar, I saved the green dye water and added blue food coloring to it to dye the blue silk.


MakeBabyStuff.com
recommends wearing gloves to prevent dye stains on the hands, but I didn't have those either...



I "recycled" the red dye concoction by adding 3 packets or orange Kool-Aid to make our orange play silk.


I used the vinegar soak from step one of the tutorial for my yellow dye. I had 2 packets of Wyler's lemonade, but it wasn't as brilliant a yellow as I wanted, so I added a good splash of my favorite brand of yellow food coloring.

It is called Best Odour Brand, made in Thailand! I just like the name! They make extracts, too!

When the silks were hung to dry, I was so excited I wanted to wake my preschooler from his nap to come see them! I refrained, because I am trying to save these until Christmas!


But I did give him the white one to play with, which made a great "snow" surface for the Arctic Playset!

8 comments:

Kathleen W. said...

Can Can, you're an awesome mama!
The colors look great!

One Mom said...

What gorgeous colors! Looks like a really fun project...my granddaughters would go crazy over this one :)

Melissa said...

Wow.. what a neat project!! Wish I could be that crafty--- my kids would love it!!

tiarastantrums said...

what will you do with these???

Live.Love.Eat said...

Wow, I never heard of a playsilk before now. Thanks!!!!

Brandy said...

AWESOME! I would never have thought to use kool aid to dye anything thanks for the tips and sites.

Wendy said...

What a fun idea, it's a perfect idea for that arctic set. I'll have to tell the teachers at our preschool about it. What will you do with the colored ones?

Superdumb Supervillain said...

so pretty!!!