September 5, 16-18:00
During the Mitmachentag of the Elisabeet, Färbehutte is also offering open dye hours where people come and dye and experiment. On this Friday, few people came with their own t-shirts. We made sure that they are cotton or natural fiber made and washed well before dyeing. Then we first dip in PH10 ash water then start dying. Even one of them was more than 50% tencel, it dyed quite well after 4 dips.
Some people also tried dye test with cotton fabric the hütte provides. Quick shibori with rubber band worked well. It made a nice round pattern.
Later date, one of the participants came back with her yellow wool sweater. She wanted to rather have it in different color than yellow.
Melanie told me that we have to be careful when we dye used (already worn) cloths that it is well (hot) washed so there are no bacteria from our body living in the fiber. Wool is a bit tricky as we usually do not wash them hot. Making sure that the sweater is washed, we dipped it first in PH10 ash water, then to the vat. She dyed in total of 4 dips.
It was a bit tricky as the sweater/wool sucks a lot of vat water, and I was not sure if we should squeeze it back (tip from Melanie later: yes, we should squeeze it as much back before lifting the textile out of the vat water if possible, and try not to loose vat water as less as possible as we also loose bacteria!). I ended up giving wrong information and we did not sqeeze it back so we lost a lot of vat water this day. The color was out of this vat for few days but eventually came back.
The result was a beautiful green sweater. She happen to have the same color sweater, and we took a photo of before and after next to it..
