>My Creative Space.

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I don’t know how it got to be Thursday again so soon, but I just heard the garbage truck roar by, so oooooohparently it is, & here we are again in ‘My Creative Space’.

I am still on the doll making I was contemplating last week, what is it they say… slow & steady wins the race….?! Here are the girls so far – don’t worry, they’re mostly ‘armless. (HA! I kill me!)

I did something I’d never done before with the calico for their bodies – tea dying. I’d been curious about it for ages but just hadn’t gotten around to doing any until last week. As is my style, I winged the entire process, also known as “making it up as I go along“.

I put a bunch of teabags in a BIG pot of boiling water & waited for the water to get nice & dark, then I added a bunch of salt because I thought I had read somewhere that that helps the dye to take… that could be totally wrong, but hey, it’s just salt & can’t hurt…

I added the fabric & stirred it occasionally for about an hour (I took the teabags out when one started to leak tealeaves everywhere… oops!!), then I left it covered overnight. I rinsed it in the morning & it lost a little bit of colour, then hung it to dry out a little, before ironing it to dry while it was still a little damp.

Dry, it’s a whole lot lighter in colour than when it’s wet – so different that I freaked out briefly thinking I had the iron too high or something & had ruined it, but when it was all done I was very happy. I actually have a dress that I think used to be tea dyed until an unfortunate incident with some bleach, so I think I’ll have to do a little more of this in the near future – it was fun stirring a big steaming pot of aromatic fabric – I felt like a sorceress putting an evil spell on someones cloak or something… *mwahahahaha*