Dying Lace

While I was working away testing Colleen Babcock’s latest design, Snowflake Sprite, I realized that I needed some lace to work with the colour and the pattern of the fabric I chose. Since mine is a Christmas Sprite and because it has kind of a muted black pattern to the fabric, this began to feel like a bit of an “oh oh” moment. I had some of the lace to go around her middle and I had the crinoline type to use around her ankles, wrists, neck and hat…but I needed more to embellish elsewhere.  You can see from the picture that there are many places to trim which makes for a wonderful time spent on the floor of my workroom rummaging through my boxes of trims.

What I needed though was something to contrast with the black because otherwise, to me, it just seemed to much of just red and black. Off to the store and I found some dye for cold water and I picked up some packages of Kool Aid. I thought I might as well work on a few things at a time and try out a couple of techniques. I used two colours of lace, white and ivory. This is the result.

With the cold water dye and the colour, Ebony, I got this result. I don’t know the chemical reason why and it doesn’t matter to me actually. I enjoyed seeing the results and since I’m not so hung up on the details, it frees me up to just play and see what happens. It’s not perfect you can see the odd place where the dye didn’t take quite as well, but it’s fine with me, because I think it just adds to that vintage feel of the lace.

The next examples, I used Kool Aid. I don’t even remember the names of them, but you can see that orange and pink are the results. I absolutely love the results. I used to worry about trying to find the perfect contrasts of colours for projects until I tried this. I was so pleasantly surprized and happy with the results.

I have a collection of tonal laces without the stress of trying to seek them out. The pink set below is the same colour of Kool Aid, but the larger lace is originally ivory and the bottom piece was white, so you can see the subtle change but still within the group….

A wonderful playful moment. Give it a try sometime, just play and have fun. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be what someone else likes, it just has to be a creative moment and it’s all about freeing yourself to not follow the rules. Besides, who made those rules in the first place.