Dyeing Buttons - Wednesday WIP

When I get an idea in my head, I rarely let it go.  My Dad once told me that a Bull Dog, latches onto what it is after and just hangs on.  I guess in a way I am a bit of Bull Dog, but I try not to attack LIVE things, just ideas!

A while back I was gifted a big batch of buttons, at least half of them were various white ones.  My plan was to sell the buttons, in my ETSY shop, once they were sorted and picked over, but a couple of thousand white buttons would just get tedious after a bit.

Then I saw an article about dyeing buttons!  Ah Ha! says I.  I will dye some of those white buttons and then I can sell them in a variety of colours!

Well, success and failure.

I bought a couple of boxes of Rit Dye.  I wanted to get Yellow, but the store didn't have any in stock, so red and blue it is...

So I went to the 2nd hand store and bought  a small pot for $2.50.  It is quite an excellent pot for that price, too.  I didn't want to use my regular food cooking pots -- you just never know for sure how non-food things could affect you.  A 2nd hand pot, it is...

First I tried out the red dye.   BEAUTIFUL!  Oh and did you know that glass, shell or ceramic buttons don't absorb dye?  Only plastic or nylon; but that's okay cause glass buttons are apparently a bit more rare now-a-days and therefore one can ask a higher price for them... Good, hey?

WOW! beautiful bright cranberry red!  So even and shiny!  And once the buttons were in the pot, I let the pot simmer and stirred them up a few times for about 10 minutes...

Next I tried the blue.  I must admit I didn't pick through the buttons before I put them into the next dye batch in the pot.

I at first thought that there must be alot of glass, shell or ceramic buttons in that bunch, but I did a second batch and the blue dye just doesn't absorb into the plastic buttons nearly as well as the red.

I even did a batch where I put about a tablespoon of the blue powder dye into the pot and about 1/2 teaspoon of the red, hoping to get purple.  It doesn't work that way with dye of this type, I guess.  I don't know why.  Some of the buttons did go a really dark burgundy but most went that bright cranberry red, even the ones that in the first blue batch stayed white, picked up the cranberry red.   So I have many fewer blue buttons than red...

Well, there are still some buttons left and I do want to try to get some green buttons and some yellow, but I think I will just buy dye in green and yellow, rather than trying to mix colours...  It is a bit too iffy to try to mix dye powder to get a pleasing colour. I'll go with the box... 

That is my kitchen experimenting for awhile, as I probably have 4 or 5 hundred red buttons to sort and package and list in the ETSY shop and a couple hundred blue ones...

That should keep me busy for the next couple of days -- its raining today so what better job than to sit and sort buttons???