I am always falling in love with new wraps, but sometimes it's fun to dabble in some dye and make something new from what we have. I wanted to share the dye process of two Oscha Kasumi patterned wraps and a short review of both. I've got a lot of photos, so maybe it be best I make two separate postings of them. Lets start with the one I did first: Kasumi Peitho.
I had this colourway both as a wrap and ring sling and below you can see what the original color looked like. I loved the red and white, but always felt like the water theme deserved something more blue and green.
Before jumping in I did a little research and found out from some one who had already done it that when stripped the red color would turn a caramel yellow and the white into a light yellow. I wanted to make sure that after dyeing the original pattern was still noticeable. The advantage to dyeing this wrap was that 25% of the makeup was silk, which needs a different dye process to dye than cotton, which meant that when dyeing with Dharma's Procion fiber reactive dyes, they would only take to the cotton fibers and leave the silk fibers just a little stained.
I played on photoshop a while to figure out what color combo would look the nicest, and finally ordered some turquoise and jade green dye. I did a normal tub dye with the recommended dye amounts per pound. The ratio of colors was about 2/3 turquoise and 1/3 jade green. Before dyeing I did a quick soak in soda ash.
Wrap in the dye bath
Rinsed out and washed. The red turned more into a dark red and the blue was really pretty.
I almost wanted to leave it at that, but my original idea was a green and blue, so after a month of looking at it, I decided to go ahead and strip it. For the stripping, I poured hot water in a cooler and used RIT color remover from our local grocery store. Here's my supplies before starting: stirring stick, cooler, rubber gloves, scissors, timer, hot water.
You can see the water color is changing. During the process I couldn't really tell how far it was going, so I just did the recommended time. The dye is coming off, but I couldn't really tell until I was rinsing what the final color was. A lot of the color came out while rinsing in the bathtub.
After a final wash the wrap was finished. Here it's pictured next to Kasumi Nahua, which was my original dream wrap and inspiration for this one. At the end of the day, I ended up liking my creation better. The red is now a pretty olive green color and the blue is a nice blue green sea foam. But what can I say, they are both pretty.
And of course some action shots:
Quick review: This is one of the thicker Oscha wraps that I have owned. It was a little grippy from the very beginning, and it has a silk smell to it that was different than my cotton/linen/hemp blends. It's up to you if you like that or not. The smell got weaker as the wrap was used and washed. I would have thought that silk was more slippery, but both my silk blend wraps (SN Nebula and this) from Oscha have similar wrapping qualities. Once you got the passes in place it would hold very well and was super supportive. I wouldn't say that this is the cushiest marshmallow wrap on my shoulders, but it's not diggy or uncomfortable either. Because of it's thickness it is a great wrap for the appropriate weather. We live in TX now, and I would not choose this as something to use when it's 90-110 degrees outside. In the winter, I love having this around.
Next post, I'll go over the dye process for a sister wrap for this, the Kasumi Nassau.
No comments:
Post a Comment