Make Craft Dye From Old Markers, and Use It On Paper, And Much More!

Yesterday I shared with you the wonderfully creative little packages my friend Rosi from Italy sent me here, and now I’m really excited to share with you the process that she used to create her beautiful paper and hand dyed twine!  The photos above show how Rosi used the dye as paint and then sprinkled kosher salt (large grained salt) over the pieces while wet. Rosi’s original post about this process is here.

To Make The Craft Dye You’ll Need: Old ink inserts from markers and denatured alcohol. That’s it!
If you don’t have any old markers collecting dust, you can also make this dye by diluting colored ink (sold in small bottles) with alcohol. Haven’t tried it but that sure makes sense.

Dye Recipe: In a glass container submerge 6 marker inserts for every 500 ml alcohol, and let sit for a few days.

How To Dye Using The Submersion Method: For items like paper, twine, egg carton pieces, pasta for crafting, feathers, shells, couscous, salt, and anything else organic, you can use the submersion method. Simply submerge your items in a jar filled with dye and let sit for at least one day. To get brilliantly colored pasta like in the photo above, leave pasta in dye for two days. Paper should be rolled, or folded once and rolled, if you’d like to use pieces that are taller than your jar.

How To Use Dye For Special Effects On Paper: Apply dye to paper
with a paint brush or eye dropper, combining colors as desired.
Depending on the type of paper you’ll be using, the colors bleed into
one another resulting in beautiful and accidental patterns. To disperse
color even more, you can also add drops of plain alcohol to your paper.
Sprinkle kosher salt (very coarse) on wet paper to get the effect seen
in the top photo.

Now instead of lamenting how quickly markers seem to get used up, I’ll rejoice! And I think I’ll just have to convince the kids to color with markers all the time for hours, you know, on really big pieces of paper!
And I just realized that Rosi is a kindergarten teacher, and that explains why she seems to have so many marker inserts to recycle!

Thanks again to Rosi for your wonderful inspiration. You can find many more interesting projects on Rosi’s blog here. And if you want to feel like you’ve traveled to Italy, so try and read the Italian! It won’t cost you a penny.

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