#idye poly

I’ve been super bored and restless today so I decided to finally color-match one of my Blythe scalps to my Heather Sky, since I don’t like fake scalps and I wanted one without bangs for her, and I had a spare packet of Brown Idye poly so I figured I’d give it a shot! The dye itself was very coo ltoned, closer to grey than brown but since the skintone of this scalp was super pink/reddish, I figured it would color-correct the cool tones of the dye and give me something close enough to look okay on Heather. I planned on giving it dark roots because it’s impossible to dye the scalp without getting the roots anyway, and when I dipped the hair in it gave me this super nice dark grey color and it’s frankly gorgeous!

So! To-do of the day was dyeing Nareths body :) Used iDye Poly Lilac and Silver grey (1pack silver grey, 1/4 of Lilac). Didn’t come out super even, but at least I got all the shades right on all parts. Dipped them into the dye/water in pairs; resin of different thickness takes dye differently, means the small knees turned quicker dark than the upper legs.

Some tips for people who want to try dyeing:

 Clean the doll thoroughly. Make sure that there are NO small specks of “whatever” on the resin; the dye does NOT go through bits of hot glue or epoxy, means if you take them of after the dye job, there will be undyed spots.

Be aware hat you might need to mix colors; i.e. only a pack of brown might not turn your doll into a nice shade of tan, but could result in a vomit-like brown/green - get colors that might help beforehand (so in case of tan, red and yellow and maybe grey). I really thought I had a pack of blue somewhere :| Then is color would be a bit more bluish, as planned. But I can life with purple.

Don’t put the dye bag into the water and let it dissolve (as advised on the package), but cut it open, put a bit of it onto a small cup and mix it with hot water. If available, filter it with a coffee filter or something - to make sure that really ALL particles are gone. Reason for this is that in the final mix in the pot the un-dissolved particles will swim on the water surface and will stick to everything that you put in there - but (of course not) evenly, but in streaks.

Rather mix not enough dye, than too much. I’ve started with a fourth of the Lilac pack; if I’d have used the whole pack, he’d look like a very fresh blue eye. It might sound great “more color = quicker results” but trust me, its better to take your time.

The hotter the water, the quicker the results. I’ve reserched a lot before starting in that project, read especially a lot in the keyboard forums, because a lot of people are dyeing their keycaps with iDye. There are some very nice tests how the amount of dye, the temperature an the amount of water have an impact on the resulting color.

Don’t let the water boil and create bubbles (bubbles are bad, they collect the evil particles from #1), but keep it a bit under boiling point. Also, move the parts around, otherwise the evil particles will set on the resin.

Posting this here, too, since it might prove useful to some.

Some of you may know already, but I am making Vanille from Final Fantasy as one of the costumes for WCS, I have been making her necklaces/neck hoops recently. They were a little headache to me when I was first thinking of the possible materials they should be made of. To me, Vanille's hoops look like wood, but actual wood wouldn't bend enough for me to get them around my neck. Then I thought of plastic hose, but where would I find brown hose like that? Could I paint it? I would need to find a paint that actually sticks and stays on a surface like that. But then I remembered the oh so awesome dye for plastic and other synthetic materials, that I had read about a long time ago: iDye Poly.

So what I did, was scrape the PVC hose I had with a cheese grater to get the wooden texture on it, and then dipped it in the dye for a few minutes. I thank the world for the witchcraft I have witnessed with this dye.