Design Dye Review Part 2

Yesterday, I told you all about the basics of Design Dye. Today? I’m going to tell you about all the cool things beyond the basic “this paper dyes fabric!” excitement. Because Design Dye isn’t just a one trick pony–it’s got some cool features I didn’t expect.

Design Dye is reusable. Yup, each of those cut outs can be used again–at least twice. Of course, the color intensity is a little less depending on how bright your first print was, but they can be printed up to 3 times before recharging. And to recharge? Just place your cutout, dye side down, on a second sheet of dye, cover with tissue and iron. You can also put dye on something that isn’t a cut out using that method, like a feather, leaves, or doilies.

I used all of the flowers from the tests and printed them repeatedly on fabric to create an all over design. Because each layer of dye is slightly transparent, the flowers get darker where they over lap.

You can use the transparency to layer colors and create any shade you wish. Design Dye comes in eight shades but you can mix those shades by printing multiple colors one over the other.

In this case, I printed the red flower first and the yellow and blue ones second. If you’re going to properly layer colors, you want to print the lightest color first and work your way up to the darkest. Because I printed the yellow second, the orange isn’t as visible as the purple. Another interesting facet of this technique is the way the first layer of dye stains your second cutouts, using the same principals as recharging.

Reprinting the cutouts I used in the dye layering print resulting in fun multicolor prints of my flower. The Design Dye website has tutorials and ideas that build upon this method to create all sorts of cool designs.

The website also recommends using your paper cutting tools to cut the dye sheets. Which made me curious–how detailed and small a design can the dye handle? Breaking out my trusty die cutter, I picked a fairly small design with a lot of detailed edges–a one inch bird from the Tim Holtz collection. And the Design Dye? Printed beautifully.

All in all, I was pretty impressed with the Design Dye’s capability. I feel like its definitely a good product for beginner use–there’s barely any learning curve and results are instantaneous. With no messy clean up or need for complicated materials and processes, it’d be a great choice for projects with kids of all ages (so long as there was a lot of supervision with the ironing).  On the other hand, it’s not a product I’d ignore as a seasoned crafter either. I feel like there’s a lot of possibilities for inclusion in mixed media and other fabric art projects. Many collages utilize writing and I’d love to see someone utilize all of the available die cut fonts to create some beautiful prints.  I know I’ll be keeping an eye out for more cool projects using the Design Dye.

Ready to try it? You can pick up your starter kit on the Design Dye website. Or you could check back tomorrow. 😉