Tea Coffee Dye Tutorial for DIY Photo Props

Tea Coffee Dye Tutorial for DIY Photo Props

First thigns first, not all items will dye the same. It depends on how porous your item is and how dark you want your item. This tutorial is for clothing articles, intended to be used as DIY photo props in my belly and baby photography business: scarf, bandeau bra, etc.

For this tutorial in particular I am dying a peice of cheesecloth, about the size of a scarf, for using as baby wrap in my newborn photography sessions.

It started out stark white:

One thing to know is that for some reason there is always coffee left in the carafe in my kitchen.. I don’t even drink coffee, so perhaps I don’t truly understand why it cannot be dumped until the next morning when it has clearly been cold and yucky for the entire day. Anyway.. One day, I took advantage if HIS bad habbit and used the leftover coffee for my DIY photo props dye project. There was about 2 cups of stale, cold coffee letf..yumm? I snuck the leftover coffee and poored it into my antique “sink-bowl”. I did a few test strips for colour, and once I decided on the correct shade, I then proceeded to stir my cheesecloth in the coffee until it was fully saturated. I left it there, submerged, for the amount of time as my preferred test-strip (8 minutes for my preference). I rang it out, made sure everything was evenly coated with colour and let it dry (about 30 minutes). I then rinsed it to remove the excess coffee, and then let it dry again. This is the acheived colour:

purenaturalnewborn-gatineau-ottawa-newborn-photographer-DIY-photo-props-tutorial-choosecloth-coffee-tea-dye-tea-bagSince I wasn’t 100% happy with it, because I wanted it a bit darker, and it was going a little too much on the brown side for me and I wanted to keep it a nice creamy colour, I decided to have another go at it but with TEA. Standard, regular tea has almost a pink tone to it and it would help to stay away from the brown tone. Nothing fancy needed, your average no-name teabags will work just fine!

Since I absolutely LOVE tea, I was drinking a cup-full while doing these diy photo props, so I ended up throwing the “used” tea bags into my bowl (coffee had been dumped and rinsed out prior). That means I had three (3) teabags in there, along with about 2 cups of boiling water :

Again, I started with the test strips to make sure it would be what I was hoping for. Indeed it was. I ended up leaving the cheesecloth baby wrap in the tea mixture for about 30 minutes to really get the colour stuck in there (a lot rinses out with tea dying).

This is what I acheived after letting it dry and rinsing again:

Keeping in mind that this image is of the wrap still WET after the final rinse. It dried a little bit lighter but notice the lovely pinky cream tone.. LOVE! Perfect for newborn baby portraits 🙂

UPDATE: I snuck a snapshot of the final product once dried (below)

I also dyed one of my bandeau bras for maternity photography sessions, for the intimate images or for my maternity gowns and dresses; they’ve become a very popular trend lately:

Check out these gorgeous newborn photos with the DIY photo props in-use :

Click here to see more DIY Tutorials and Photographer Tips & Tricks

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