Sunday, December 19, 2010

flowers to dye for

My brave friend, Sarah, came over on Saturday to help me dye 200-something coffee filter roses. It took us about four hours, but much of that time was spent playing with the RIT dye trying to get the colors just right.

We (very scientifically) mixed different batches in mason jars, dipped coffee filter test strips into them, and put the strips on a cookie sheet in the oven at about 250 degrees for quick drying.



Satisfied with the spectrum we created, we began with yellow flowers, moved to shades of pink, coral, and red, and ended with the oranges. The tree outside was the best place to hang them to dry.



But we decided to speed up the drying process for a few of them, just to get a better idea of the final product all together.



Fluffed, to speed drying of the inner layers.



Annnnnnd... Flowers! Now, I have to decide between merely fluffed:



Or fluffed with each petal curled at the edges. Much more rose-like, but also much more work.



What do you like best?

5 comments:

  1. The colors look great!

    I probably like the more time-consuming one. Isn't that just always the case.

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  2. I like both, but the extra time really shows. The devil is in the details!

    And I'm glad you didn't burn the house down drying them in the oven. And the dye worked so much better then the food coloring that we experimented with!

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  3. The dye does work a lot better. I tried food coloring, but the colors were too faint.

    I'm going to go with curled under. It won't be too bad, especially with all the free time I have right now.

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  4. I'm in a blog! I feel so special. I like the uncurled better because it looks like you can fit more flowers in each vase.

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