DIY: Ombre Dip Dye Tags

I had a grand old time experimenting with dip dying last week. T-shirts, stationery, old kitchen rags. Virtually everything looked better with a little ombre dye. I had to stop myself before the drapes ended up in the dye bin. Have you ever experimented with fabric dye? I’ve always wanted to try dyeing with kool-aid, anyone have success with that?

Find the full tutorial here, plus my tip to avoid those harsh lines in the left tag pictured below.

 

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Comments

What a brilliant idea! I am in love with ombre and I think I might have to “borrow” this for my wedding invitations!

I’ve dyed fabric with kool-aid before, but not paper. Since you have to set the dye in the fabric before you can use it, I lost all the fun kool-aid smell. Another fun thing to try is dying with fruits and vegies. Several years ago with my daughters school class we were making a quilt of fruits and vegies and wanted to see if we could dye any of the fabric that we would then use in the quilt. We used red cabbage, blackberries, beets, and cranberries. The red cabbage dye was a beautiful red color but dyed the fabric a lovely blue color that held it’s color very well. The rest were beautiful colors to start with, but didn’t really set well into the fabric. For instance, the beet fabric turned a very odd (and quite unattractive) shade of brown. But it was really fun. I wonder if dying paper would keep their great colors because you don’t really need to “set” it.

I showed my fiance this tutorial yesterday and we are going to try it out for the escort cards for our fall wedding. I’m also going to try this out with the garlands I’ve made out of little white paper stars. I found a tutorial for the stars and started making them by the handful. I have a ton of garlands already made but it was only after they were all assembled that my fiance commented on how it might be better to have different colored stars to stand out. I thought I was going to have to start all over again with colored paper but this makes it so much easier and allows for more variation on colors and shades of dark and light. I’ll let you know how they turn out. Thanks for sharing!

Oh looks lovely, the color is great. I must say I really like the straight lines on the left card! Makes is more graphic like. But with clothing it might not be the best, I don’t know – this calls for a try-out! Thanks for sharing

Yes! I did try it with clothing and the blended lines did look better but I see what you’re saying about the harsh lines on the tags. Kind of cool too!

Hi Liz! I’ve used kool-aid to dye yarn with some wild success. I found that tossing the whole shebang into the microwave for 5-10 mins, depending on your desired shade depth (or boiling it in a pot of water for an hour!) works the best. The coolest part is that the yarn sucks all the color out of the water so that I knew when I was done or when I needed to add more kool-aid. I’ve got a sweater on the needles that smells a bit like grape/wild cherry, though I’ve found that the smell wears away after some time. Thanks for the dyeing tutorial!

That’s the funny thing – The smell does sorta go away, but I think it comes back…. For a sweater that I’ve been working on, I thought the grape/wild cherry smell had gone away after a few weeks. But then I dug it out after a few months and it seems that the smell has returned! I must have just gotten used to the smell the first time. I’ve got tons of kool aid laying around, and now I’m inspired to make some tags and cards and wrapping paper with your tutorial! Thanks for sharing it!

I’m so glad you shared this today, I have a stack of tags that need a purpose left over from the holidays. These are beautiful, thanks for sharing!

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