Creative Dyeing Downunder

I have been as busy as ever during our Covid 19 lock down. As well as all my normal sewing I have been doing some on-line courses.
One of them is called Creative Dyeing Downunder with Jacinta Leishman. It is conducted via a closed Facebook group which is working well and is easy for people to upload photos. Jacinta is well- known for doing the dyed silk, wool and threads that are available at the online shop called The Thread Studio.

I wasn't really going to start dyeing threads but the course was pretty cheap and it's so rare to have a class with Jacinta.

The course uses Procion dyes for cotton and Acid dyes for silk and wool. I have plenty of Procion dyes but no acid dyes so I went online and ordered some Landscape acid dyes from Kraftcolour. They have everything you need for any surface design and it came quickly too.

Landscape Acid Dyes

They had many different sets available in various colourways and I found them irresistible, so I probably bought much more than I need!

Here is some silk thread wet and ready to be painted with the silk dyes.

In my other online course, I have been taking photos of all the autumn leaves and trees that are around at the moment so I decided to stick with the theme and paint the threads with autumn colours.

I also got out some cheese waste wool that I must have bought when I did a felting course a couple of years ago and painted some of that as well.

Painting silk thread

I only used an 1/8th of a cup of water with a 1/4 tsp of dye but I had too much dye left over so I cut up some pieces of silk fabric and thought I would try dyeing that as well.


The dyes have to be wrapped in plastic and steamed to fix them, so I got out some small freezer bags to hold the fabrics.

Silk fabric preparation

Silk in plastic bags

Everything has to be in plastic because the acid dyes need to be steam set. I didn't want to use any of my saucepans so I went off the Kmart and bought a cheap electric steamer that I'll just use for dyeing.

Silk steamer

The steamer has a third layer as well but I didn't need the third one this time. I set the timer for 1 hour.

I let it cool and then rinsed it all in a colander that I also bought to use. It was amazing that no colour came running out. So different to all the rinsing that has to be done with Procion dyes.
I love acid dyes!

Here is the silk thread and wool dried.

Silk and wool dyed

Here are the silk fabrics that I dyed.

Silk dyed with acid dyes

I was very happy; there were a couple of tiny spots of undiluted dye on the fabric that weren't noticeable on the threads. When I use it for fabrics, I'll have to make sure that all the dye is completely mixed in the warm water.

I still haven't dyed the cotton threads with the Procion dye, I might get to that next week. I have my other courses to work on as well.

Bye for now,
Linda