Blond Roving- how to?

[skakitty]

I've just been searching about the net, thinking that i would like some blond coloured roving dreads and that i would like to have a go at hand dying-

but how do i get them blond? I've had a look at the dyes on offer but can't see many natural colours. please correct me if i'm being dense!

cheers

[LittlePinkFaery]

I used tea to get a darker blonde

It comes naturally in a cream colour, or you could get a pale lemon.

[Jane Doe]

If it's appropriate, I can write a tutorial for tea and coffee dying.

Here's some pictures of how tea + coffee turn out

------Coffee --------- Tea ----- Natural white wool

[Elokin]

I'd like to see a tutorial. I've never tried dying with tea.

[LittlePinkFaery]

litterally, hot water, lots of tea bags, squeeze tea put ( like you would with a cuppa) put wool in, leave wool in till it goes cold, squeeze out and dry

repeat for darker colour

[skakitty]

Oooh wow this sounds good i'm want to have 'pirate hair' for a party i'm going to, and wanted somthing to match my hair colour (dark blond/brownish) so i reckon this would be the best way to achive that.

Thank you for the advice!

[VixenSingsBlack]

Anybody ever do like 1/3 Coffee and 2/3 Tea? I want to dye some roving blonde as well, but my hair is between Jane Doe's coffee and tea. Will it make a difference doing both at once? Isn't tea sort of acidic and coffee is not or something...

[LittlePinkFaery]

I don't know- maybe look at a weak coffee dye and if it is not enough put it in a tea dye?

[skakitty]

Yeh, my natural hair is kind of 'mouse' ie: not blond but not true brown - meh!

[Neon Black]

I've used tea to great effect, but if you intend to wash the roving at all, the 'dye' will wash out of it so you would need to top it up again afterwards.

(The way I do mine is fill a big pan with hot water and a few tea bags, leave it to stew, wait till the water is cold! and remove the tea bags of course, then put the dreads in and leave them a few hours - over night depending on the shade, then take them out and rinse in cold water and leave to dry.)

[Jane Doe]

I've used tea to great effect, but if you intend to wash the roving at all, the 'dye' will wash out of it so you would need to top it up again afterwards.

Really?
I've always found tea to be colourfast. I've used it in my textiles projects without any hassles...
Maybe I used a mordant back then, I can't recall.

[skakitty]

oooh do you think you'd be able to do transitional blond? like kinda light coffee coloured then going into blond/tea? @D

[LittlePinkFaery]

course- you mean leaving some cream too?

once you have dyed it once then dip the bit you want dark in - should be fine

[[Tank]]

Then wont your roving smell of tea/coffee afterwards? *blink*

[Miffy]

If it's colourfast you can always carefully wash your dreads in some nice smelling soap

[VixenSingsBlack]

I'm really interested in trying to do a coffee base with tea highlights, cuz that's basically the way my natty hair is. Could you, in theory:

pre-dye 2 lots of roving before it's felted by soaking in room-temp coffee and room-temp tea

allow to dry

tear appropriate length pieces of coffee roving for the base

Rip off itty bitty but equally long bits of tea-roving

somehow mash the itty bitty pieces of tea-roving in with the coffee roving to create highlights

felt

Would I need felting needles to make sure the small tea bits attach to the larger coffee bits? Or would they simply felt together when plunked into the hot/soapy water? I'm not looking for a neat swirl effect here, just a natural highlight kind of messy look.

Any thoughts?

[Miffy]

I think it could be done that way. Sometimes when I pull strands some roving tears off or I have to redivide the wool, so I have to add a little strand of roving and in most cases it works pretty good. If you give the section some extra attention, it will felt nicely with the rest of the strand.

[VixenSingsBlack]

I made an off-white, well felted DE merino wool dread. I dunked it in really strong coffee for 6 hours. Then I took it out and rinsed gently in cool water. In the end it came out a very, very, very pale shade of yellow--nothing like JungleDread's gorgeous, creamy brown.

Any advice? If the DE is so well felted, will it stop it from being stained by the coffee? I'm so confused and disappointed.

[MrsEss]

Do you have to fix them, like when using acid dyes you have to add white vinegar?

[elainevdw]

I'm delurking to jump in here since I spent the last week or so trying to figure out the easiest way to get blonde, light brown, "mousey" blonde, or "dishwater" blonde (don't you hate that term?) on wool roving.

I love using natural dyes because I used to henna my hair, so the first thing I wanted to try was onion skin dyeing. Mostly because I came across this great onion color wheel online.



My hair is a dark blonde/light brown with gold undertones, so I figured half yellow onions plus half red onions would be golden brown. I was incorrect. I boiled one bag worth of yellow onion skins and one bag worth of red onion skins (given to me be a nice produce worker at the grocery store), then simmered three already-felted white wool dreads for 15, 30, and 45 minutes. It came out kind of orange -- I think I should have used just red onion skins. Anyway, after that I decided to try barley tea, but I didn't have a lot of time. So I boiled the barley tea for 30 minutes and then dyed a felted dread for about 20 minutes.

This is how those two experiments came out:


Mixed onions (15 minutes) -> Mixed onions (30 minutes) -> Mixed onions (45 minutes) -> Barley tea (20 minutes)

I bet the barley tea would have turned out better if I had made the tea stronger and cooked the wool in it longer, perhaps in a crock pot for a few hours.

This is the tea-dyed strand compared to the undyed strands:



Then I went back to VSB's food coloring tutorial, particularly this link, and decided to try food coloring. The only food coloring I could find was that Betty Crocker "gel" food color, which is just the food dye mixed with sugar and stuff.

There's actually a recipe on the back of the food coloring box for light brown, it's 7 parts red to 3 parts yellow to 2 parts blue, I think. It's really annoying to try and get exact ratios of the gel colors, so what I did was mix up 1 part vinegar to 3 parts hot water in a mason jar, and guesstimate the amount of food coloring. Using red, yellow and green turned out a lot better for me than red, yellow and blue, by the way. Anyway, I dipped a white paper towel in the water and when it was closer to brown than red I stuck a dread in there and nuked it in two-minute increments in the microwave, stirring in between nukings, for two or three cycles.

At first I had too much red. The wool soaks up red quicker than the other colors, so what I finally discovered was that I wanted the dread to look kind of green-tinted when I took it out of the jar; when I rinsed it off in the sink in cold water and squeezed all the excess liquid out, the extra green rinsed off, letting the red come through and giving me a more believable light brown color.

For a lighter blondish brown I could soak the white dreads for as little as 30 seconds without having to re-nuke the dye bath. For richer brown I would do two or three 2-minute nuke cycles in the microwave.

Because I was doing it in tiny little batches to try and get the perfect color, all my dreads ended up slightly different colors... which I really like, even though it was a little stressful and took forever.


Here's what I finally ended up with. On the far left are the three onions and one tea; the rest are all food coloring.



If you end up with dreads that are too red, or too orange, you can fix it by re-dying them in a dye bath with more green and yellow to counteract the red. I redyed the six dreads on the far left to get them closer to the rest of the colors.

Here's the final products mixed in with the purple roving I felted to go with it:





When it comes to food coloring vs. natural dyes, you have a higher margin for error since you're working with primary colors rather than natural levels of brown, but the benefit is that it takes less time and less dye material. For example, I used enough barley tea to make 8 liters of iced tea, but I only used a fraction of the little tubes of food coloring. The onion skins were free, so the amount of skins didn't matter too much -- but it did take at least 15 minutes of "cooking" compared to 30 seconds to 6 minutes for the food coloring.

I hope that helps someone! And I'll post pics one I get these decorated and installed, probably next weekend.

A huge thank-you to everyone who posted the tutorials, etc., that I've been rabidly devouring for the last two weeks! This is my first dread extension project, and my first time working with wool roving.

[MrsEss]

Ooh, I managed it! 100% colour fast...I used half a bottle (about 200mls) of white vinegar in a pan with freshly boiled water & 2 or 3 tea bags. I left mine in for minutes I acutally think five was enough.

A pic:


The ones that went in the pan first were a little darker, but I liked the fact they were varied shades of blonde, made em more "natural" iyswim.

[elainevdw]

Ooh pretty! What kind of tea did you use?

[MrsEss]

Er, it's called "everyday tea" or something like that, basically what we had in the house. Normal, English Tea

http://shop.twinings.co.uk/shop/everyday-tea.html