In my previous posts I experimented with dyeing cotton string with coffee and onion skin, which are considered natural dyes.
Today I tried dyeing the same string, cotton cord from a company called Hemptique, whose string is natural, good quality, and, according to their website, sustainably produced.
Unlike my last experiment in which I scoured the string before dyeing, I skipped that step here and just soaked the pieces for 15-20 minutes in various colors of Jane Davenport's brand of inks called 'Inkredible Inks.'
The inks dyed the strings evenly and the majority of the color remained in the string upon rinsing, which I was really happy with.
CAUTION!: One note on the use of these inks however, is that there is absolutely no ingredient list on this product, nor is there any suggestion whatsoever if these are watercolor inks or alcohol inks. I even looked online for a listing of ingredients or the existence of a Safety Data Sheet and found nothing.
Upon further searching, Google Gemini (the AI app) suggested that these were indeed watercolor inks, but that the Jane Davenport company, (others do the same, apparently) intentionally excluded an ingredient list to prevent other companies from copying their inks. In other words, their ingredient list is 'proprietary,' which I find problematic, because if they contain ingredients of any level of toxicity, I do not know and can't find out.
Furthermore, I think that the labels are fun and youth-oriented in their design, so that young people of school age might be attracted to buying and using them. But I would not allow a child to use these unless they were wearing gloves and closely monitored since I have no idea what's in these things. Just my two cents.
That being said, I think that this dyeing method can be useful if you want to create your own custom colored cord for macrame, as this was my reason for doing this!
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