How to dye silk flowers

This post has moved to my new blog at https://bobbinsofbasil.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/how-to-dye-silk-flowers/. Head over there :)

All my hand-dyed silk gladiolus (with one bunch of white, undyed
flowers for contrast)

This post goes along with my post on my wedding flowers. Since two of the colors in my rainbow color scheme don't exist in nature, and the purple was hard to match perfectly, I dyed silk gladiolus in three colors: teal, blue, and purple. 

I didn't like any of the online tutorials I found, so I came up with my own method based on several tutorials I found for faux-dyeing fabric with acrylic paint, shown in the pictures below.

**Not all acrylic paints are created equal! I had lots of success with Apple Barrel brand, but the Folk Art brand was horrible for me. The purple turned out much lighter than I wanted, despite multiple rounds of dipping.**

My method involved using acrylic paint and fabric
medium (I used Martha Stewart because it was the only
kind I could find). Mix the paint and fabric medium as
instructed by the fabric medium (mine recommended
a 2:1 ratio, I think). Add water. The more water you
add, the lighter the color will be. I'd recommend about
a 1:1 ratio of water to the rest of the mix. 
I mixed a blue and green color together
to get the perfect shade of teal.

The husband helped a bit!

I covered the flower stamen with a little "condom" made
from duct tape to prevent the dye from getting on the
yellow part. 

I covered the flower stamen with a little "condom" made
from duct tape to prevent the dye from getting on the
yellow part. 

Then I dipped the flower in the dye, petals facing down.

I dabbed off any excess dye with a paper towel and q-tip.
Then, I wiped off the stamen (The yellow part)
immediately if they did get any dye on them.

To dye the buds, I pulled off the plastic bottoms and
flipped the leaves away so they didn't get dye on them.
I didn't figure this out right away, so some of the teal
and blue flowers aren't as perfect.

It was very important to have a paper towel ready to draw
all the excess dye away from the yellow stamen.

Drying blue flowers.

Drying blue flowers, off the stem.

After drying (this is very important), you need to heat set the dye so it doesn't bleed if the flowers get wet. I did this with a hair dryer. I don't have a picture of the process, but it's pretty self explanatory. Just blow dry the flowers for a few minutes.

I think the colors match well! The teal
flowers are shown with the waistband
of the teal dress.

Really, if you didn't know which flowers
were dyed by me, would you be able to tell? 

If you haven't already, check out the final products in this post. The florist incorporated silk flowers in with real flowers for the bouquets and church arrangements, and we mixed these hand-dyed flowers with other silk flowers for the table centerpieces. The best part is that these flowers never die, and I have flowers in every color of the rainbow for my decorating purposes. Our guests were allowed to take their centerpieces home, but we still were left with a lot of them. It's ok, though, because they're fake :)