mountains of muslins

So apparently muslins are pretty useful when you have a baby, they're just like very absorbent, soft cloths and have millions of uses, so i had to get myself some. However, then i discovered that they are mostly plain white (yeah i know!...the flesh rebels!) or you can pay double the price for some anaemic pastel baby blue or pink ones....LAME! So i bought some of the cheap white ones and got busy dying them with my "freecycle-find" coldwater dyes.

I had never dyed any thing before so i was a bit vague about the quantities of water to powder to soda ash etc....but they turned out ok! I did learn however that trying to use less water (see the olive green ones) doesn't give such a homogeneous colour...but hey, every day's a school day. It was only really at the end that i thought of making patterns...for the orange one below i pulled lots of little bunches of the material up and put little hair elastic bands around, so they were shielded from the dye....looks quite cool i thought!

I tried it wish the sky-blue ones as well, but it's less obvious in the photo. The other blue ones were knotted and tied in strange bundles so the colour is quite patchy in a sortof vague pattern.

I also thought these little mini towels could come in useful as well, for wiping up messes and since they were 20p each from ikea, i thought i couldn't go wrong. They were a very nasty off-cream colour before they were mercilessly plunged into the dye bucket....and now...ahhh! much better!