dyeing playsilks
Miri and I had a great time dying playsilks. It was an easy project, although somewhat involved and with long intervals in which she couldn’t help, so we interspersed it with other projects and playing. She remained interested, though, and was beginning to get the routine down by the last couple of scarves.
We used these instructions from Sara’s Toy Box for dyeing with koolaid, and they worked like a charm. I wish I had gotten slightly bigger silk scarves from Dharma Trading, but I think I may end up ordering one of the veils or another larger piece of silk to add to Miri’s dressup trunk. The colors were really bright and beautiful with the koolaid, with the exception of the purple, which is sort of a dark, murky color, not the bright purple I’d hoped for. I suppose you could experiment with mixing a couple of packets of grape with a packet of cherry and see if it brightened it up? Some of the colors are more sort of mottled and cloudy than others.
Actually I have yet to wash, dry and iron the scarves, even though we did the dying over a week ago. I plan to do that some time soon, since she already wants to make (temporary) doll clothes with them. I hope to post some pictures of her ideas soon!
In case we run out of ideas for what to do with our playsilks, there are some ideas here and here. I think that a large playsilk/veil would be a terrific toddler/preschooler birthday gift, and not unreasonably expensive either.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:42 am