Sunday, April 20, 2014

Let's Dye with Coffee!!

What could be better than coffee? It's beautiful scent, it's soothing color and the kick of caffeine when you really really need to make it to the end of your work day!

Remember this shirt? I bought it on ebay and took it in. It's a linen cotton blend and perfect for hot days! I love it (it's super lightweight and fits like a dream) but the color is pretty terrible.

So! I researched all the internet to find out how to dye this shirt! Everybody had different ways to do it, so I jumbled it all together and started a brew!

All of the instructions that I read had all these different ideas about how to make the coffee color stick ie: ash soda, vinegar, salt, etc... so I just used vinegar since I had that around. I used about a cup of it and let it soak in!


Then I added the coffee....and I didn't make enough! This is about 10 cups all together with the second batch! (Bye bye decaf coffee!) I really wanted the color to be dark, so I left it in there (it was around boiling) for 20 mins.

I pulled it out, washed it with warm water and tiny detergent, then let it dry!

Voila! Much better!

2 comments:

  1. Hey, that's weird. I know I commented on this post. Sorry if you end up with two comments from me on this same post, but I just wanted to say I love this! The color is so much better and it looks fabulous with your new skirt =D I love dyeing with coffee and tea because it's just not as scary as using powdered dyes (and you don't have to find gloves to do it).

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  2. Actually, this is the first time I've seen this post! Although, feel free to post as many things as you want. You could post a million things on here and I would read them all, no matter how repetitive! Ha ha ha! Yeah, I would like to do more natural dyes if possible! I actually found this ridiculously amazing 800 pg book about all the possible natural dyes you could harvest/use and pictures of all the color combinations. Yeah, pretty much fabulous!

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