Play silk fun

It seems that the majority of blogs that have crafts for kids include dying play silks in their posts. I am now, no exception. Today, after a nice long walk to the nearby fruit/vegetable stand, the oldest and I dyed play silks using kool-aid. We followed the instructions found at make baby stuff.

We started out by putting all the silks in a large pot that had 3 cups of white vinegar and 5 cups of hot water. Since I was working with a child, I put a splat mat in my work area to make clean up easier.

While that sat, we prepared our dye. We had 6 different colors and 10 play silks of various sizes.

Depending on the size of the play silk(s) we used for each color, we put 1 parts vinegar to 2 parts warm water in 6 bowls and mixed in 1 or 2 packets of kool aid. Naturally, the darker shade the water/vinegar mixture is, the stronger the color of the silk will be. We also added a couple of drops of food coloring to the yellow and green and used only food coloring for the blue. An added bonus: the kool aid made our kitchen smell fruity!

Next, we put our play silks in the dye making sure they were well and evenly covered with the dye. If you do not want them to look splotchy, try to get out all of the air pockets so no part of the silk is floating on top. (We figured this out after they dried, but we kind of like the various shades.)

We let each silk sit in it's dye for several minutes then rinsed each one separately in cool water until the water ran clear.

Next we laid them out to dry. Cloth diapers were hanging on the line so we used our deck chairs, making sue the silks did not touch so dye would not bleed off one onto another. After a couple of hours the silks were dry and ready for play.

Our home was quickly converted to a superhero's playspace!