Dyeing to Try Something New?

My new old kettle

A few weeks ago my dad was unwrapping some garage sale donations he'd received for the charity garage sale he was running. They were little knick knacks that someone had packed away a long time ago. The cool thing is that each little schotzke was wrapped in fabric. My dad, sweetie that he is, put it all aside for me to go through.

After the One-Step dyes

I think the lady who originally packed everything must have sewed a few fancy dresses in her time, because there was a lot of lining fabric and satins. There were some brocades, some curtain fabrics, and one big piece turned out to be a dress that had been cut apart. I have no idea how to date fabric but the dress looked like something from the late '60's early 70's. I wasn't crazy about the baby blue brocade or all the white and cream so I decided to try dyeing them other colors. I had some of Tulip's one step dye's from another project and so I used the blue and pink.

The lighter fabrics are the coffee dyed

The colors were lovely saturated hues but turned out a little too bright for the vintage style project I have in mind so I decided to try over dyeing them with tea. A quick trip to the thrift store, and I had this super cute old kettle to use for the tea dyeing. As I reached for the tea in the cupboard though I realized that I only had green and chamomile teas (which wouldn't give me the brown I was looking for). I did however, have a pot of really dark coffee sitting there so that went into the pot with the water I'd been heating for the tea. That diluted the coffee quite a bit so the results weren't as vintage-y distressed as I wanted. But, it did mute the colors quite nicely. They're quite lovely now. 

I also tried playing with a few other ways of altering the fabric and trims I had. So that's the something new I decided to try this week. Here's some pics- Enjoy!

 Here I'm using Staz-on ink and a roller stamp and rolling over the fabric in different directions. Pretty!

I've been playing a bit with a few distress stains I picked up and one of the things I've found I like them for is adding a little additional color to my dyed trims. It makes them two toned in just the right spots.






 I also tried using the distress stain on some cheap cream lace ribbon I got somewhere. This particular material didn't take to the one step dye's too well, but it did work quite well to apply the stain directly to the trim. I haven't tried any of these for permanancy yet. As I'm thinking of making corsages with them I'm not too concerned that they're washable.