Welcome to Part Three! What started as an inspiration to use her my son's worn out wool socks for the core of a Waldorf style doll head quickly evolved into a challenge to make a complete doll and outfit from repurposed materials.
It was easy enough to find the materials needed to make the doll itself – a t-shirt for the skin, an old pillow for the stuffing, and socks, lots of worn out wool and cotton socks. Creating the hair from repurposed materials was another story.
Shari Fuller is back with us to continue the creative upcycling topic and in this tutorial she is going to show how she solved the doll-hair dilemma with a solar dyeing project.
What is Solar Dyeing?
This type of dyeing is super simple as it uses the sun for the heat source and all natural materials such as leaves, flowers, or vegetables for the dyestuffs. Black tea works really well for a light brown dye and because it contains tannin, which acts as a natural mordant, it is one of the easiest dyestuffs to work with. A mordant is an additional ingredient that is added to a dye bath to help the fiber absorb and retain the color.
Natural dyestuffs work best with protein fibers such as silk or wool. Cellulose fibers
such as cotton, linen, or hemp will also work, but may need additional mordants and the dye color can be less reliable. Synthetic fibers will not work as they do not absorb natural dyes very well.
How To Solar Dye: For this project, I used a light colored wool sweater, a pot of boiling water, black tea leaves, an old sock to hold my loose tea leaves, and a large container with a lid to soak the sweater in.
Step 1 Prepare the Tea Bath: To begin, I tied up my loose tea in an old sock and place it in my soaking container. I put my tea bags in as they were, but I recommend that you tie up all your tea in old socks, because some of the tea bags split open and made a mess of things... as you will see later in the video.
Then, I covered the tea in my container with boiling water and set it aside to steep and cool.
Step 2 Prepare the wool sweater: While the tea bath was cooling, I soaked my sweater in room temperature water.
Step 3 Dye The Wool: Once the tea bath cooled down to room temperature, I carefully squeezed out the excess water from the sweater and placed it in the tea bath. It is very important to wait until the tea bath has cooled to room temperature and handle the sweater gently because sudden temperature changes and agitation will shock the wool and cause the sweater to felt which would make it almost impossible to unravel later on.
I needed to add additional room temperature water to the dye bath to completely immerse the sweater, then I placed the cover on my container and set it outside in the sun.
Step 4 The Dyeing Process: After letting my sweater set in the sun for a week, it was time to see how it worked out. The combination of the heat, tannin, and fermentation worked together to set the color.
Step 5 Rinsing The Wool: Remove all of the tea bags and then I took out the sweater and set it aside to dump out the dye bath.
I gently squeeze as much of the dye bath from the sweater as I could and then rinsed the sweater in clear water, about the same temperature as the dye bath to avoid felting. I rinsed the sweater in water several times until the water stayed clear and most of the loose tea leaves were gone. In one of the final rinses, I added a little shampoo to give my sweater a good clean.
Step 6 Time To Dry: Once my sweater was rinsed clean, I gently squeezed out as much water as I could and laid it out flat on a towel to dry.
Now the wool is ready to use in the project!
Follow along in the video to see how to unravel the yarn. Once we have the sweater unraveled, we will use it to create the doll wig!
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