Saturday, February 13, 2010

My daughter and I planned to venture into the realm of dyeing our prefold and fitted diapers today.  We started with 9 colors of Dylon dye, a pair of rubber gloves, a stainless steel bowl, and paper towels.  I then planned out how many diapers, onesies and burp cloths I wanted to be each color.  I had more cloth than dye so some of it will be left for another time.  I first prepped the diapers as per the manufacturer's instructions and laid them out on the table.


These are the ones left for later:

I mixed the dye in 4 cups hot water in the stainless steel bowl and then filled the sink with bath-warm water.  I mixed in 4 TBSP of Mortons Salt and then mixed in the dye with a whisk.  I then added the wet cloth.  I added the cloth wet because it absorbs dye more evenly that way.  Below is Bahama Blue and Tulip Red.

I stirred each dye with the whisks continuously for 15 minutes.  After that I stirred them well once every 15 minutes for another 45 minutes.  Below is Flamingo Pink and Tropical Green.

For fun here is a picture of my daughter stirring the cloth.

After they were done soaking, I rinsed the cloth with cool water until the water ran almost clear.  Then I took them to the basement in the stainless steel bowl to avoid drips and began washing with Tide Free.

I washed each color in hot with several extra rinse cycles until no trace of dye remained in the rinse water.  Then I dried them completely in a hot drier.

Here is the completely dyed stash.  Newborn prefolds are on the left, small prefolds are in the middle and fitteds are on the right.

We added embellishments to a few of the prefolds and fitteds.  A few examples are below.

I also had some plain white covers that I decided to test in the dye.  The results ae below and I plan to try some more with the next batch of dyes.

These are the onesies that we dyed and embellished.

I hope you enjoyed!  It was a very time consuming process but not really hard or messy.  I am looking forward to finishing up the rest of our cloth soon!