Yellow Rinse

 
 

There are many methods of dye removal.  The yellow/gold rinse is another fairly simple one.  It is not an ancient Ukrainian technique, as those all utilized natural dyes and allowed much different color sequences than modern acid/aniline dyes do.

What is a “Yellow/Gold Rinse”?  It is simply a jar of yellow or gold dye set aside for that purpose, nothing more.

Why is such a rinse even necessary?  Because some designs call for colors from more than one color family, and often there is no way to sequence them properly.  There are three color families of dyes: yellows/golds, blues/greens and reds/oranges/pinks/purples.  When crafting a dyeing sequence, the yellow or gold color will generally be your base color, and then will be followed by progressively darker colors from another color family (which will cover the yellow or gold color well). 

If you wish to incorporate colors from both both color families into your design, you need a way to switch from one to another.  If there is only to be a very small amount of green, blue, pink or purple, these colors can be applied by spot-dyeing while the egg is white or yellow.  If there will be large areas of a non-sequence color, then a yellow/gold rise may be one way of allowing it.

The yellow/gold rinse allows you to move from the Orange/Red family of dyes to Blue/Green the family of dyes. It is most useful when you have a design which has large areas of red and a blue or green background.

The Yellow arrow between the two denotes the yellow/gold rinse.



Using the yellow/gold rinse is simple and straightforward:  After applying wax to the yellow (or gold) egg, dye it orange, pink and/or red, as called for by the pattern, using traditional color sequences.  Apply wax.  Then put the egg into the yellow/gold rinse, and leave it in until the shell is a nice, even orange.  This may take a while, and you may wish to change the egg’s position once or twice to ensure even dyeing.

Once the egg is yellow/gold, you can proceed using blues/greens, as called for by your pattern.

While the yellow/gold dye does a fairly good job of removing oranges, reds and pink, it is somewhat slow, and the yellow/gold dye gets quite dirty/muddy in the process.  That is why, if you are going to use yellow/gold to rinse your eggs, you should keep a second jar of that dye around just for this purpose, and label it as your “Yellow/Gold Rinse.” I usually use an older jar of dye for this. 

Once your jar gets very muddy, replace it with a new jar of dye.


Note:  A yellow/gold rinse can be a very slow process.  I will usually do an orange rinse first (with a clean, not muddy, orange rinse or just my regular orange dye), as it is quick and gets me halfway to my desired color.


 

From Reds to Greens

  Orange Rinse        Water Rinse



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