Fabric Colors

[D'Snowth]

Shopping for fabric for puppet building is always a headache in general anyway, but I've found that one of the biggest woes when it comes to fabric shopping is how half the time, you can never really find the exact colors you want.

Has this ever happened to any of you? Take pink for example, in the past four years or so, I can NEVER find the right shade of pink that's necessary for certain fabrications (squirrel noses, for example), it seems like pink fabric either comes in jus two different shades: baby/powder or like a salmonish hue... the former, admittedly does work well for skin tones, and I use the latter for throats/uvulas/whatever you wanna call 'em anyway, but just a decent pink is never available.

Likewise, certain shades of brown had hard to come by too, especially light brown (not tan or beige, but just a light brown, like the color of chocolate milk).

 

[Slackbot]

That's why I have a stash of Rit dye in all sorts of colors. If I can't find the color I want--which is usually the case--I'll make it myself.

That's dandy for things like cotton and Antron fleece, but not so good for things like fake fur. I spent a week trying to dye some white fur orange, and the best I could do was a light tan, which screwed up my plan to build a Cantus Fraggle replica. I ended up making him into a different character rather than have him look like he was a hundred years old. On the other hand, to make a Boober puppet I dyed some gray fur blue, which resulted in a decent dull blue color.

I may try shading the neon orange fur I have found with some brown dye. Maybe that'll let me make a decent Cantus.

 

[ncchuck]

I have never dyed anything or sewn anything from scratch and went fabric shopping for the first time ever and I could not find the colors i wanted at all had to settle for a light pinkish and dark purple for my first failed attempt i was going after a golden yellow-camel color,it took me around 3 hours to sew 1 arm yesterday

 

[D'Snowth]

Yeah, it's never entirely a good idea to try and dye fur... I remember years ago trying to dye fur a charcoal gray color, and it came out silver instead. Eventually, I was able to get ahold of the fur I wanted (in the color I wanted) from fabric.com.