Rainbow Puppets! Blue Pt 2 - Color is Not Quite Right

Hey Reader!

It has been a long time since I wrote about my plan to create a series of puppets in rainbow colors. I got distracted by a bunch of other important things craft projects! What could be more important than finishing a puppet? I know, I agree with you there, though you can pretty much get the answer to that question by reading the backlog of posts I wrote since March.

Anyway, I am back at it with my blue friend who is named Blue. I will certainly never be accused of creativity. I had a plan in place to do something very different, but after seeing the success of Sprocket, and that he was out of my care after the auction, I was inspired to improve on my Sprocket design.I saw a few things I could do to make that design more clean and exciting, so I wanted to get to it before all of that fell out of my head.

I used another carpet to make this puppet, these things are amazing and inexpensive furs for puppets. Generally, the pattern is exactly the same as Sprocket. The big difference and one of the major improvements I wanted to make was to attach the arms in the initial sewing stages to avoid some of the difficulties I faced last time. I really got hung up there with Sprocket and had to hide a lot of less clean work under a feather boa. Blue is going to be boa free! That's a weird sentence.

I made six segments of my monster body pattern, rather than five I did last time. This will allow me to sew a front and back separately and attach the arms in the seam of the front of back. As I examine this pattern, next time I make a monster like this (and it will be a while so I can keep up at least the illusion of variety), I will use straight rectangles for the back, so that the puppet's belly is more oriented forward. I think that will make for a very different silhouette.

I had everything all cut out and started sewing it together. I won't get super detailed about the process for that, since it is largely identical. However, I did make the mouth more triangular this time by forming the form into a triangle shape as I cut out the pattern for the mouth plate. It will give the puppet a Scooter-like visual.

There is just one problem. The color is all wrong. As you can clearly see, Blue is a sky blue color here. That is all well and good if he were a one off like Sprocket, but as a part of a rainbow series, that is just not the blue you see in a rainbow. I toyed dark blue arms and blue yarn for accents but I wasn't sold. The main color of the first puppet in my rainbow series cannot be the wrong color. That is a level of irony I am not prepared for. So I started looking up ways to change the color of the fur.

Sure, it would probably be easier to buy fur in the right color, but frankly, I felt like tackling this problem now was going to serve me better moving forward. For starters, I have three of these carpets in white. Secondly, finding fur at fabric stores is already a struggle, let alone specific colors. Sure I could order it online, but than I have to wrestle with photos that might not look the same in real life and I just wasn't prepared to have that fight 6 more times. Figuring out how to change fur color now was going to help me as I work through this project, and no time like the present to learn.

I found a few tutorials on changing fun fur color. I am going to be trying different techniques as I more through this project, but the one that seemed more attractive given how far along in the project I am is a tutorial by Paper and Stitch from a few years ago. It also seems like the easiest as it doesn't involve paints and brushes. It does require dye, specifically Rit Synthetic Dye. I, of course, don't have Rit Synthetic Dye in blue. I do have Rit All Purpose in blue. On the side it says "NOT FOR USE ON SYNTHETIC MATERIALS." Great. You can probably guess what happened next. If you guessed that I went out to the store and bought blue synthetic dye, you might be reading this blog for the first time.

Here comes the experiment: will all purpose dye work on a synthetic material like fun fur. I figured, even if it didn't work well, the fabric is already blue. I just needed to get a few shades out of it. In a rare turn of events, I carefully followed the instructions on the dye (except the one about not using it on synthetics, but whatever). I had my bucket ready to go and filled it with hot water and half a container of dye (and a little extra because if it didn't work, certainly more dye would help that problem, right?).

I was going to try to do a dip dye thing where I let the color come out all ombre. I was a little concerned that none of this would work at all, so I quickly abandoned the ombre idea, in favor of soaking the fur for the top end of the recommended spectrum provided by Rit.

Dying fur has always been a line I have been hesitant to cross. I know that fun fur isn't the highest quality stuff ever and maybe its like a Gremlin in that getting it wet is a major no-no. The drying was particularly a concern. Then again, I pretty much covered Sprocket in glue, so how much more damage could water do to fur?

Rit recommends that you use gloves when dying fabrics. I didn't have any laying around because I am not a serial killer, a cleaning person, or a doctor on a medical drama. I suppose all doctors use gloves, not just the ones on medical dramas.

Point is, my hands turned blue.That stuff is pretty stubborn. It is almost like it is designed to permanently dye fabrics. If you find yourself in this situation, don't touch your clothes. I also found that soap and water got most of it off my skin, but my fingernails definitely were blue for a while. I saw a YouTube video that said toothpaste might help, but I wasn't too worried about it. A week later and there is no evidence I did any dying.

I left the fur to sit in the dye for a while, stirring it occasionally. I took some out to rinse it every once in a while and it appeared to still be bright sky blue on the front, but the fibrous backing was turning darker and darker by the minute. I thought maybe I could get away with trimming the hair short and letting a little of the dark "roots" show through. Finally with about 10 minutes to go in the dye bath, things started to look darker.

The tutorial showed the person putting the fabric in the dryer. I was worried about doing so. What would I do if the dye stuck to my dryer and I was left with gross fur and a ruined machine. I eventually caved and put it in, once I was sure that the dye was going to adhere properly. I haven't had any issues with my clothes and the dyer came out looking good so it worked!

It still isn't quite blue like I was hoping, but it is certainly closer. I feel more comfortable with this color than the sky blue, and the accents will make it very clear what I am going for.

Now that I know this works, I am probably going to be dying more furs moving forward, maybe even with the right kind of dye! For now, it is time to get back to making things, rather than just writing about it all the time.

Keep making cool stuff,
Until next time,
JoshPrime