Blogaversary and Buttons

I can't believe that it's already been a year since I started posting on this blog. Wow, the time has flow by and I'm proud to say that I had a few good posts and lots of fun with the many people that I've met in the blogging community. Thank you all for making this experience fun and rewarding.  Let's have a birthday donut to celebrate!

Lately, I've been making a ton of hats and leggings for my local people. Many of these hats feature button accents using the vintage buttons that I have in my stash. Lots of these buttons have great shapes, but the color is not right for my project or the white makes them look cheap. The solution, dye. Yep, you can dye many plastic buttons with plain ol' Rit dye. They have instructions on their web site on how to do it.

I love these buttons because they look like smarties candies, but the white doesn't do anything for me.  I followed the Rit dye instructions, but I wanted a much deeper color so I ended up leaving mine in the dye bath for about 1hr along with this next set of buttons that I also just love because of there unusual texture.  Don't they look much more elegant and expensive in the brown.

I think that they really turned out great and for those of you who have wanted to try button dying, it really does work. The only thing I might warn you about is to test your color combinations out before committing special buttons to the dye bath.  I wanted a brown with a hint of green so I used dye combination brown #3 using 1tsp of Coco brown and 1tsp of dark green in the powder.

You can also use the dye bath to tint colored buttons.  I have a set of pink buttons that are super cute, and I wanted to use them on a pink and mauve hat that I made.  The problem was that they were just too bright, so I brought them down a notch in the same dye bath that I used on the other buttons.  The only difference is that I only left them in for about 1.5 minutes so that they were only tinted and didn't completely loose their pink coloring.


























The brown buttons go much better with this green hat than they would have if they were left white.  While this is not really economical to do for just a small amount of buttons (since dye costs about $2 a box), it would be worth it for a larger batch of buttons or for coloring special buttons that you want to use on a specific project.  I defiantly will be doing this again in the future.