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Tag Archives: dye
I’ve Got the Blues
The bangs in your face, thick eyeliner angsty indigo blues. The life is pain, nobody understands me, what does it all mean blues. I swear it’s like I’m 14 again listening to Alanis Morissette thinking about how unfair the world is.
Whilst wallowing in my funk, I started pinning indigo images to my “Blue” board (it’s just sad, I know), and I found some images of a dyeing technique called Shibori. A couple of the crafting blogs I read (Honestly…WTF & Design Sponge) have recently had posts about this process and I really think I’d like to give it a try. Now all I need is a moderately cool day and a decent excuse to give my boss when I come to work with blue hands. This part isn’t self deprecating: I just have an uncanny knack of getting whatever I am working with down the inside of my gloves, happens every time I dye my hair. I’m good like that.
Images from Blue, Honestly…WTF & Design Sponge
Dye, Paint & Eggs Oh My!
It’s Easter egg time! I’ve loved decorating eggs forever. When my brother and I were very little my mom would set up the dye cups on our front porch and we’d don our art smocks (one of my dads old shirts) and go to town. Eventually we were allowed to dye eggs in the house, but the when I think back, the front porch dye sessions are the first memories that come to mind. The feel of the cool concrete under my bare feet and carefully carefully caring my egg in that little wire spoon from color to color. Pretty basic stuff, but if you feel like being a little fancier, here are some great DIY’s to get your Easter Party started.
Speckaled Pastel Easter Eggs – 100 Layer Cake-let
Silly Face Easter Eggs – The Paper Mama
Cascarone Easter Egg – The Paper Mama – my favorite!
Natural Dyed Easter Eggs – The Sweetest Occasion
Indigo Dyed Eggs – Henry Happened
Confetti Dipped Eggs – Studio DIY
Pineapple Eater Eggs – Studio DIY
Pretty Pretty Hair
I wanna dye my hair so badly, and not just red, brown or blond. I’ve done all of those many times. I want purple, pink, teal, green…..you get the idea. One of the worse things about my job is that I can’t always be “myself”. Which especially rankles since I spent so much of the last decade figuring out who exactly “myself” was. It’s an on going process, one of the many that I am working on with the ladies of Whole Soul Lab (shameless sponsor plug). One of my biggest fears is that I’ll fade into a beige cube dweller that wakes up 40 years from now to find that my life has passed without actually living it. A little dramatic right? But irrational fears are just that. And before you start to worry, I know that I can still be me without all of the other stuff, but I like the idea of the Julie in the mirror being able to match the Julie in my head.
In my boss’s defense, he does try his best to accept my extracurricular body modifications (piercings/tattoos), which is really tough since there is a 40 year age gap and he is very, very, very conservative. He did let me dye my hair purple for three weeks one December (since we didn’t have any clients coming in). Plus, I get to keep all of the piercings I came into the job with and I don’t have to cover my wrist tattoo, but I think anything more would be pushing my luck. So I’ll wait…for now.
All images from here.
A Little Strange for a Monday…
But what can you do? It’s Monday, I have so much to get done at the office, so many errands to run after work and what am I thinking about? Dip dyed menus. Seriously, grocery lists, appointment times and wondering what excuse I can use to make these. Hmmmm, what about Easter Brunch in APRIL. Julie, what are you doing? If you can’t focus I’m not going to let you have any more coffee. Now go put on the big girl pants and focus or no afternoon caffeine jolt, I mean it….. I can be so unfair sometimes.
-Juice your vegetable of choice
-Dip in vinegar for a more saturated effect
-Use a thinner like nail polish remover or terpantine
-Experiment by dipping into different colors and thinner – going back and forth for a varied effect
-Allow papers to dry overnight
-Place a heavy weight on top of menus in case of curling
I am tempted to use this technique on stationary, but I am worried about when/if they dyes go bad. I’ve used vegetables to dye fabric before and it works wonderfully, but since you can’t wash paper I’ll probably do some additional research before making something to keep longer than a couple of days.
Images and tutorial from Sunday Suppers.