Pin It Do It Challenge - DIY Dip Dye Clothing

Here's Roz's first #PinItDoIt post, don't forget if you've tried any Pinterest inspired projects you can send them in to us!  :)

It was our screen printing classes last year that started my interest in creating bespoke items of clothing.  When I saw the pin below on Pinterest, I knew I wanted to do something similar straight away!  Purple is my favourite colour and I had been considering using the same shade of Dylon dye - Intense Violet - as the original pinner for a while.  So I bit the bullet and ordered some dye on ebay.  I even had a cotton v-neck tshirt in my wardrobe that I thought would be perfect to try the technique out on.

Source: allabouttink.co.uk via rozzystar on Pinterest

After talking to my friend Lauren, who was planning on using a similar technique using red dye on a white jumper, I thought it might be a more wearable option for winter into spring to also create a jumper.  We decided to try it out on Saturday and Lauren popped into Primark to buy some cheap jumpers as we were scared it might not work out!  Luckily she also remembered to bring the salt, as you need to dissolve 250g of salt into warm water before adding your 50g of Dylon dye.

So we prepared our workspace (my bathroom) with buckets, scales, spoons for stirring, a timer and followed the step by step instructions on the original pin.  The idea was to create the same 3 shades of colour on our finished items.

The actual process was easy enough and keeping the jumper on a hanger ensured more control over how much material ended up in the dye.  The colour of our jumpers looked great through out and we were very excited to see what the finished result would be!

However, as we followed the final steps (rinsing our garments in cold water before washing in the machine) we quickly realised that things had not worked out as planned :(

Our jumpers had only taken a hint of the colour, with mine looking a pale lilac and Lauren's a pale pink.

It took us a few minutes to work out what was wrong, originally thinking that it might have been that we only used half of the packet of dye (because we were in effect only looking to dye half of our material) but as we halved the water and salt quantities we thought we had the science bit correct.  It turns out that our epic fail was our cheap jumpers!  They were 100% acrylic and the dye is for use with cotton, wool, silk, polyester mix etc.

So in reality this is not quite the excited and happy blog post I had hoped it would be, but I thought I would share it with you all anyway as a warning to always read instructions on packets!!  Has anyone attempted anything similar in the past?  Or fancy trying out this technique, using the correct materials of course?

Roz xx