Shaving Cream Fabric Dying

Posted on Feb 1st 2016

Shaving Cream Fabric Dying
Cabin Fever Quilters
July 2005

This is a fun way to make your fabrics and t-shirts come alive with color!

Shaving cream is your medium and base for the dye.

Spray it (the shaving cream) on your table (covered in a plastic cover) the size of your piece of fabric and about 2 inches thick and smoothed out with a spatula or your hand (glove covered).

TO SEE A LARGER IMAGE click on the image.

1
Spray the shaving cream on your table (covered in a plastic cover) the size of your piece of fabric and about 2 inches thick and smoothed out with a spatula or your hand (glove covered).

Katrina, Kimberly, Terry and Hannah (hidden) applying the shaving cream to the table making our shaving cream cakes getting ready for our dye.

Katrina, Hannah, Terry & Kimberly layering the shaving cream onto the table getting ready for the dye.

2
Then you take your dye, we used Ritz powdered and mixed it two teaspoons to 1/2 cup of hot water to dissolve it. Then you dribble it onto your shaving cream in whatever pattern you wish and swirl it with your finger (glove covered of course) or use a comb or brush etc. Create your pattern swirled or lattice or whatever. One girl created a flag in her shaving cream.

Darlene - dabbling the dye onto the shaving cream.

Katrina, Hannah, Terry & Kimberly starting to dabble the dye onto the shaving cream.

Dabbling on the dye that then can be swirled or made into whatever pattern you want with your fingers, brush, comb etc.

3
Then you lay your fabric over the top and lightly smooth it down not pressing too hard and let it sit and soak up the dye you will see the dye come through the fabric... the longer it sits the more intense. The less it sits the more pastel it is. Once your ready... have some saran wrap laying flat on another covered surface and a little larger than your piece of fabric - overlapping saran wrap is fine.

Darlene smoothing the fabric onto the dye/shaving cream mixture.

4
Gently lift your fabric from the shaving cream and lay it face down on the waiting saran wrap. Roll it up in the saran wrap and place in your microwave (fat quarter piece of fabric) for 30 seconds and remove carefully it will be hot. Take the plastic wrap off and rinse with water then hang dry in the sun or place in your dryer to dry and viola you have a wonderful piece of dyed fabric.

Hannah & Katrina laying the fabric on the syran wrap getting it ready for the microwave process.

Hannah adding the fabric wrapped in syran wrap to the microwave for it's quick warm up before it's rinse process.

Darlene & Terry Rinsing a piece of dyed fabric after the microwave process.

Terry with a final rinse on her died fabric

Tips
You can use the same shaving cream/dye pile for more than one piece of fabric and you can add more dye to that pile to add more color for more pieces of fabric. You can mix up the cream and get color bases and add more dye and swirl for other effects. Change your shaving cream pile to change colors. The shaving cream pile does last a long time - we got them to last all day.

I am sure - I used Colgate(blue can) but you can not use shaving cream with baby oil in it. The type with aloe was ok but came out of the can different, not as creamy as the shaving cream without aloe. I bought 8 cans of shaving cream and used maybe 2 cans... I only changed my shaving cream once to go from the purple hue to the orange hue.

If your doing this with a group then you can share your pile of cream/color... i.e., if one person is working in yellow and another is working in purple then you can share your dye and not change out your shaving cream to change your color, etc.

Finished Products!

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