I came to the Uniqlo Round Mini Shoulder Bag trend late I guess, but one day I suddenly decided that 1) I wanted a casual, small everyday bag and 2) I wanted to customize it with dye. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much online of others who had done this.
The most accessible fabric dye for me is Rit dye, which comes in two varieties. Rit All Purpose is good for fibres such as cotton, rayon, nylon, silk, wool, etc. They also make a line for more synthetic material called Rit DyeMore.
I decided the easiest way to go about this was to start with the off-white bag so the dye would show up best. The shell of the bag is made of nylon and the rest is polyester. I wanted to keep things simple, and I liked the idea of contrasting coloured and off-white parts of the bag, so I decided to stick to Rit All Purpose so as to only dye the shell. I was also worried about how DyeMore would partially take on plastic elements like the buckle and zipper.
I was compelled to dye it chartreuse or yellow (though I did flirt with some other colours). Rit has a lot of colour formulas on their website — the colours I was most interested in (Lush Yellow, Yosemite) required varying proportions of Golden Yellow and Tan so I bought those two and attempted the bucket method (a bucket in my stainless steel kitchen sink).
It was easier than I expected! I was really worried about staining my counters, so I meticulously taped it off with garbage bags. There wasn’t actually any splashing so it wasn’t necessary but I’d do it again if I couldn’t do it outside. If this becomes more of a hobby I think I’ll get some sacrificial tongs, because the most difficult part was moving the bag around in the hot dye bath — disposable chopsticks did the trick though. Despite doing the math of the recipe for Lush Yellow properly (I think), the original colour came out way more banana yellow than I wanted. It literally looked like a wet sign pylon or a Bananagrams bag. I added more tan (and then even more tan) to the bath and I ended up with a lovely chartreuse — very close to Yosemite! For some reason I was really nervous to go off-formula, but I realized dyeing in this form is less like chemistry and more like painting.
Anyway now I want to try dyeing yarn.