Dye, Dye, Dye!!!

Here are five of my ladies ready to dye, dye, dye.  I had wanted to have this mini workshop for a couple years and just never got it all together.   They arrived with lots of ribbons and laces for this first "dye day". 

If everyone in our group had been able to come there would have been 9-10 so we really needed a large space.  It was experimental and I wasn't sure if it would all come off as I hoped.  Well it did !!!








I had wanted to do it in my old greenhouse. There's cold water and means to heat water.   The two long tables were left over from days of the nursery and I added two 4' square tables so we had four stations...   I bought just about every color available in the liquid Rit collection, printed off their color mixing chart for everyone, bought numerous  containers, brushes, rubber gloves, etc.  And any spills would be no problem...  I had racks set up outside the greenhouse for drying.

 We had the two long tables with trays with multiply sections... one with various shades of pink and rose and the other with various shades of greens...

Below is one of the square tables with a  dollar-store "party tray" filled many colors for painting lace and the other table  had setup for individual color mixing. 

Everyone had a great time and the results were amazing.  My biggest concern was the weather as it had been close to 90 degrees the week prior and if it would have held we would have all had to dye in our aprons with only panties underneath.  But we were lucky  that there was heavy cloud cover that morning so it was bearable.

We definitely want to do it again a couple times more before winter (no heat in greenhouse) and try dyeing some silk and overdyeing some DMC thread as well as more laces and trims.

Everyone brought a sack lunch and we ate in the gazebo afterwards.  The giant old Alba roses are in full glory and everyone enjoyed the garden as well...  Only Kathy F. had a hole in her glove and went home with one very blue finger...