Tea Dying Fabric!

This is an awesome and fun way to make your fabrics look vintage, worn or rustic. I felt so proud of myself after accomplishing this tast. Besides that it brought out the arthritis in me. Just kidding, but seriously it really did hurt my hands from wringing out so much fabric.

I bought these fabrics for a room I was redoing in our house. I was trying to match them to an antiqued clock I have and they just seemed too like bright I guess you could say. I guess the correct word might be they were too "new" looking. So that's when I decided they needed to be tea dyed.

So I bought this! Just a box of basic tea from Wal-mart. I don't drink tea so I literally stood there forever just trying to decide what to get. I bought the cheapest box with the most bags of tea and the only thing you need to be certain of is that it's black tea. So this one worked great!

First I cut swatches from my fabric to test them to make sure this is really what I wanted to do and that I was going to get the result that I wished for. I used these containers to dye the swatches. It looked great so then...

I boiled a large stock pot of water and added a ton of tea bags. At first I only added maybe like ten but realized quickly that that wasn't enough. So I ended up doing tonz more. There's no specific recipe, I just used these same measuring cups and containers to check the darkness of the tea, and went from there. The only problem is I was filling a large plastic rubbermaid bin to do this project so I couldn't just go by the color in the stock pot, but rather get it dark enough to make all the water in the bin fairly dark as well. I reccommend only doing one yard of fabric at a time if possible, because it's so much easier and you can just use the tea in the stock pot to do that fabric. The problem for me was I was using a 3 yd peice of fabric for a bench seat cover and couldn't cut the fabric into yards so I had to dye the whole piece. --which is where the arthritis came in! ;-)

Prewet the fabric. This is the 3 yds of fabric I was talking about prewet and wrung out.

These are all the fabrics I was going to be using for pillows soaking in clear water awaiting their dyeing procedure.

My huge rubbermaid bin full of tea. Tea party anyone!?

I did this project in my garage because I obviously wasn't going to have this huge bucket of "stain" in my home. As you can see I had the hose there beside it and that's what I used to prewet my fabric and such. It was kind of awkward treating this fabric like dirt using the hose on it and dunking it in filthy water but like I said earlier, pretty fun!

Here's my first 3 yds of fabric in the bin. I actually had two 3 yd pieces of this same fabric, so I was busy!

Looks like a big joke eh? Like disgusting dirty water with an old rag piece of fabric in there. Little do you know it turns out to be a masterpiece. Ok just kidding, it's not that awesome but it's definitely not disgusting trash in the end!

You let your fabric soak up the tea until it's the color you desire. Could be real quick, could be hours. Depends on the darkness of the water and how dark you want it. Keep in mind that it's always going to look darker when it's wet, so if you think it's the right color, it may get lighter once you rinse it. Once the fabric is the right color you wish for, then rinse it under water until the water runs clear. Then I just put mine in the dryer at that point, but I imagine you should wash it and then dry it. I just wanted to "seal" the tea in by drying it straight from there. ??

This is a picture of my swatches at the first. You can see that they are much "dirtier" than the original fabric and that's what I was going for exactly. Unfortunately once the project was done, I had nothing to compare it too so this was the only picture I had that could sort of show the difference in before and after. And below is a picture of my fabric put to work!

Halloween Costumes!

I'm a little delayed in updating this blog, as my other one takes priority since it's my families journal in a round about way. However, this is my most recent accomplishment...
I made my first born a ROOSTER costume. It was a lot of fun to make. More complicated than someone as new to sewing as me, but I managed to get through it and I think it turned out fairly good! The feet were my favorite thing about it and unfortunately, they are filthy by the time I got around to taking their pictures. But you get the gist!

My second born was a duck! Had to keep it in the bird family. This costume speaks for itself, but I must add that I only used a pattern for the bunting. The rest was thought up in my head. Which is why it's pretty wild! But it was loads o' fun!

So there you have it! Happy late Halloween!

I have a ton of projects I'm working on right now. It's keeping me super busy for sure! So stay tuned for more homemade fun!

Welcome!

This is a new endeavor that I thought would be fun! I decided that I would blog about the hobbies I am doing in my life. It will be kind of a journal somewhat of the things I accomplish. I like to think I'm well rounded in the things I like to do, so this is my way of keeping a record of those things and finding out if that's really true! I just LOVE cooking, and I'm an obsessive gardener! I enjoy doing wood crafts and painting! I love scrapbooking but don't make enough time for it so I think this may help me to level out my priorities in the crafting world and get some scrapbooking done! I have so many scrapbooking supplies that it would really be beneficial to use them and make a memory book of my family! I love quilting though I can't say that I've finished very many quilts, but I have started my share of them. I think this will push me to finish those unfinished projects I have as well. I LOVE pictures and photography and although I don't have the equipment I would like to take amazing pictures, I have captured a beautiful sunset or two and I shall share those with you as this blog goes on. I also do spontaneous random crafts that are out of my comfort zone occasionally too and I will struggle through those with whoever is interested in following this blog. I'm excited and feel free to join me anytime here to see what new thing I may be up to. Chances are this blog will not get much action from me, but I hope that is not that case!! ;-)

This ones for you Josilyn! Since you asked me to take pictures of my frame project...

For the last three years, my husband and I have been carting around 2 boxes FULL of frames that we don't use. Just because after we started moving then we never unpacked them and found homes for them. Well I decided rather than throw out all our old frames, that I would spice up our hallways with them all. I make three collages full of frames based on the color of the frame. In reality, my husbands sister inspired me to do this because she has an awesome wall in her dining room that is chuck full of random frames! Anyhow, this project took us months because we had to order pictures and then order more because I'd forgotten some. But before we could even order pictures, we had to go through them all and figure out what sizes we'd need, and what to put in them... etc. etc. Anyways... it doesn't look FANTASTIC, but I think it's a fun change on the bare walls of the hallway. I just love to see all the pictures though regardless of anything else!!!

Oh and I made that random family sign with an old piece of wood that I had stashed with my frames, and some vinyl that was sitting in my drawer!

I'm glad this project is over cuz it was a lot of work. ;-)