jennanddave.com

A few months ago I ordered six play silks (plus a free silk scarf since it was my first order from that particular store) thinking that Henry and I could dye them for Holly as his Christmas present to her. This past Monday night it was very clear that Henry was coming down with a cold. I heard him coughing a few times during the night, and when he woke up in the morning, he looked pretty done in, so we kept him home. The best way to describe how he was feeling would be: too sick to go to school, but not too sick to not drive me nuts". He was bouncing off the walls, so before Dave went to work later in the morning, I asked him to pick up the usual sick kid necessities at the store, plus three packs of every flavor of Kool-Aid that they had. While Holly was napping, we got to work.

The instructions I used were a combination of these at the Artful Parent and these at Make Baby Stuff. Henry and I soaked the playsilks in hot water with two cups of vinegar mixed in while we got our first two dye baths going. For the baths I used large white soup bowls because they were large enough to hold all of the liquid, but deep enough to keep the silk submerged. For each bath we mixed two cups of water with 1/2 cup of vinegar, then added either three packets of Kool-Aid, or food coloring, depending on which color we were going for.

Henry mushing the silk down into the blue bath.

Once the playsilk was fully submerged, I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and we microwaved them for two minutes. We uncovered them, mushed them around a bit, covered them back up, then microwaved them for another two minutes, after which most of the dye was taken up in the silk. We carefully poured the liquid out because it was really hot, then rinsed out the silk and hung it up to dry. Henry was enamoured with the green one:

It was the first one that came out of a dye bath and I think we were both amazed by how beautiful the color came out, and, at least on my part, that the whole process worked at all (I'm a fatalist, what can I say?).

What we used to get the colors: Cherry flavor for the red, food coloring for the orange*, Lemonade for yellow, Lemon Lime for green, Blue Raspberry for blue, food coloring for purple, and Pink Lemonade for pink. One set of the instructions I linked to above recommends you use gloves for this. I would second that notion. I didn't bother and I had some pretty scary looking fingers for a few days.

Henry took great pleasure in wrapping up his gift to his sister yesterday after school. Although I think she'll really like them, if Holly turns out to be disinterested in the playsilks, Henry will definitely put them to good use.

* Our store didn't have Orange or Grape flavored Kool-Aid so I used McCormack Neon food coloring. I used the amount of drops indicated on the back of the box for icing a whole cake.