Post by Kim of Beehive Art

We were excited when The land of Nod asked us to explore the design possibilities for their Coloring Book Duvet Cover. I really love the sweet hand drawn design by Kimberly Ellen Hall at nottene.net and knew that however I decided to decorate it, it needed to be a fun activity for kids and colorful. With the kiddos’ input, I decided to use brilliant and bold fabric dye, a favorite technique used at Beehive ART.

With summer coming, this is the perfect project to do with your kids. You can work outside on the picnic table or lawn, leaving it in the sunshine to dry. Due to our weather, we worked indoors on a covered table.

Materials you’ll need:

• Coloring Book Duvet Cover
• Tie dye kit or Jacquard Procion Dye
• Squirt bottles/droppers
• A Bucket
• Rubber gloves

I use the Jacquard Procion dye, it comes in dozens of colors and has great saturation. A little goes a really long way so if you opt to use them, buy a bag of soda ash. Soda ash is a mild alkali bye fixer necessary for activation and setting the dye. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t. *If you don’t use the fixer, your dye will wash out. If you buy the kit, the dye, soda ash, squirt bottles and instruction comes with. I have used this kit dozens of times and think it’s great.

1. Soak the duvet in soda ask until it is completely saturated.
2. After soaking the duvet in the soda ash, wring it out and spread it across the table. Really try to wring as much of the soda ash/water out, it will be much easier to work with.
3. Put the dye in squirt bottles and/or droppers that way you have more control of the dye. We used blue, yellow, orange, green and pink dye. I think if I did this again, I might only use two colors. But I was working with a group of kids and we went for it!
4. Dye away! We put little drops of color here and there, and thought it was fun to color each image a different color (whale – blue, alligator -green, hot air balloon- pink ). It was really fun watching the fabric change and the kids had fun finding the repeated images on the fabric and coloring them in.Soon the entire duvet cover was colored in. We tried to leave some spaces white / uncolored, but that proved to be a little tricky. It was a great exploration in color and color mixing. And it was fascinating for us to watch the piece come to life.
5. Let your masterpiece rest. The dye needs 24 hours to activate into the fabric so I left it flat on the table to dry.
6. After 24 hours, rinse in cold water. Pop it in the dryer or line dry.

Have fun and sweet dreams!

Kim Poler is queen bee of beehive ART. She lives for inspiring visual expression, explosions of colors, forms and exciting combinations of mixed-media art. She creates, designs and sells art projects, teaches children art and blogs at Beehive Art.