Dying tissue paper

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Merlyngami
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Dying tissue paper

Post by Merlyngami »

I fold the majority of my origami from double or single tissue paper, as it's cheap, relatively versatile, is nice to fold, and works pretty well for most of the types of model I usually like to make. However, in general, the colour selection is pretty limited - you can usually only find a few basic bright colours of tissue paper.

For this reason, instead of buying coloured paper, for quite a while now I have been dying my own. I simply buy white tissue paper and have some red, blue, yellow and black powder dye which I add into my MC mixture until it is the colour I want. I then apply the MC as usual and, in the process of sizing the paper, it also gets dyed! Since I have red, blue and yellow dye I can mix them together to get pretty much any colour I want. I highly recommend this method for other fans of double tissue; however, there are a couple issues with it.

The main problem is that the dye I use is washable, meaning that if I wet fold or even just add glue to the model the dye dissolves again and can be rubbed off if you are not careful. This also means the method doesn't work at all for making duo paper, as the two colours simply mix together. Additionally, in general folding (even if it's not wet folding) dye will usually come off on my fingers a little, which doesn't affect the model, but is kind of annoying. I wonder if using a different type of dye might fix some of these issues (eg one that's not washable)?

I would be interested to know other people's experiences dying paper, and whether anyone has any recommendations on what sort of dye to use for wet folding or duo paper. :D
NeverCeaseToCrease
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Re: Dying tissue paper

Post by NeverCeaseToCrease »

One interesting technique I've seen is from Slater, who uses bleeding tissue to dye other sheets without actually using the bleeding sheet. He made a video of it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4AbL40-tZs
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Merlyngami
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Re: Dying tissue paper

Post by Merlyngami »

That is an interesting technique! The paper ends up with quite a cool look.
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Gerardo
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Re: Dying tissue paper

Post by Gerardo »

Wow! The big stationery stores in Bogota, offer tissue paper in a wide variety of colors. I didn't know that wasn't as common in other places :o.
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