Continued from Part 2…

When I was in painting class, one of the things I had to remember was that paint always dries darker than it looks when it’s wet and spreadable. This is also true when dyeing fabric, only I completely forgot about that when I finished the dye bath, poured all my dye down the drain, rinsed out the fabric and set it up to dry. So the next morning when the fabric was fully dry, I was a bit disappointed to see that my parasol wasn’t a nice deep red as I had intended, it was fuchsia and black lace.

I let it stay fuchsia for the next couple of days, wondering if maybe I’d like to keep it that way. So those days went by. And no, I want my black and red parasol! Solution? Re-dye!

I got a new bottle of Crimson Rit dye to use, and instead of only leaving the fabric in the bath the minimum time, I kept the parasol fabric in the dye for nearly an hour and a half in an over-saturated dye bath. This time I took note of the fabric becoming darker than what I wanted knowing that it would lighten after it was rinsed and dried.

I let it dry on the porch, and this time around the thunderstorm didn’t start pouring down rain and thrash my wet parasol around with the wind. It took a couple of hours to fully dry, but the result is a darker, less fuchsia red! A red that I am quite happy with.

Continued from Part 1…

Starting materials:
Black and white lace parasol
Crimson Rit dye
Wine Rit dye
plastic bucket
scissors
bath tub

 

 

 

Before getting to the wet part of dyeing the fabric, I had to separate the fabric from the metal frame. At certain points, the lace and fabric were secured onto the metal parasol frame by some stitching like this:

I cut and removed the threads from each point, two per frame arm. After all these points of thread were cut, I could easily pull the fabric away from the frame.

Time to dye! Mostly following the instructions on the Rit dyes’ packaging, I partly filled my bucket with hot water from the bath tub spout. Using the handle and frame as my handles, I soaked the lace and fabric in the hot water to prepare it for the dye bath.

My original plan was to mostly use Crimson dye and add a little bit of Wine dye to get the color I wanted, but when I poured my crimson dye into the bucket, there was barely any there at all. Um, oops. I went ahead and emptied out the bottle of crimson dye, then added what I figured would be enough wine dye to get a nice thorough color. I then dipped the fabric into the dye still using the wooden handle and metal frame as my handle and also kind of the stir stick.

I agitated the dye by the handle of my bucket, swirling it around a bit, and I turned the fabric often, trying to keep from accidentally dunking the wooden handle into the dye. Although the wood shaft is sealed, I didn’t want to chance it taking any of the dye.

After twenty minutes in the dye, it looked great! The color looked exactly like I wanted it, just all wet and shiny. I poured the water and dye mix down my bath tub’s drain, supplementing it with running water to try to keep from turning the tub pink.

After a ridiculous amount of rinsing the dye out of the fabric, I made the assumption that although I probably shouldn’t dunk the metal frame into water, it probably won’t hurt it if I go ahead and stretch the lace and fabric over it to let it dry out easiest. So I wrung out the fabric to at least keep as much of it from dripping down the metal frame as possible and hooked the fabric and lace back over the metal spokes.

I set it out on the porch fully open so that the stupidly hot Austin heat could dry out the fabric quickly. Unfortunately, someone ordered up a thunderstorm about two minutes after I set it on the porch! I moved the parasol back inside to keep it from getting soaked by the rain and thrashed by the wind, leaving it in the kitchen overnight to dry.

Check out the results I got dyeing my parasol here in part three!

For the past few years I’ve wanted to get a lace parasol. There was one site in particular where I fell in love with the lace parasol they carried, and I planned on purchasing my parasol from them. Unfortunately, that shop ran out of stock, and at the time, I couldn’t find any similar parasols anywhere else.

I recently thought about that parasol I wanted, so I decided to try my search for sites with lace parasols again. I was looking for solid black lace parasols, but I found an eBay shop that had lace parasols that were white with different colors of lace, including a few with black lace. Since I dyed a pair of gloves for my husband to use in his sword fight a few weeks ago, we had a bit of extra crimson colored Rit dye left. Seeing that the white part of the parasols is made of cotton, I decided it would be perfect to dye my own to black and red.

I ordered the parasol, then went out and bought a bottle of Rit dye in wine. The bottle of crimson wasn’t going to be enough, and I wanted something with a bit more purple than crimson. I planned to mix the crimson and wine dyes to get a nice something in-between when it was all done!

Continued in Part 2