A skein of DMC costs 13.50 pesos, at the lowest. This translates to two or three friendship bracelets, depending on the patterns and number of threads needed. Of course you need to buy one skein per color, and spend about 50 pesos for 4 DMCs. This can be quite pricey if you want to experiment with more colors and produce more bracelets.
So as your resident Justin Weaver(pardon Mom's joke), here is what I do to save up on friendship bracelet-making.
What you'll need:
1 ball of white crochet cotton yarn
- This is available at fabric raw-material/textile shops or even school supplies stores. REMEMBER: COTTON not ACRYLIC yarn. It costs around 40-45 pesos at malls. I bought mine at Divisoria for 35 only.
Sachets of fabric dye
- Look for Venus Fast Dyes. You can get it at your suking tindahan for 5 pesos (They call it Jobus). Supermarkets/School supplies stores sell them cheaper at 2.75 per sachet.
The general idea is to cut up strands of white yarn and dye them to your desired color. But if you don't know how to dye, here's the step-by-step process:
1. Boil a quarter of a dipper(approx. 2 cups) of water. (Tabo po, hindi timba, okay? :D)
2. Pour the water into a basin/dipper and dissolve the sachet of dye. Stir.
3. Submerge the strands of yarn into the solution
4. Leave for 10 minutes. I have to give it to Venus for really being such a fast dye. The yarn strands actually absorbed the color in less than 5 minutes but to make it more pigmented, let it sit for 10 minutes or longer.
5. Rinse until water runs clear. Let it dry
As for the number of strands that you can dye per sachet, the most I've tried is twenty 30-inch strands and twenty 60-inch strands. So that's like sixty 30-inch strands in all :)
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| Dyed yarn strands |
How much you can save up:
A DMC skein is about 8-15 meters only while a crochet yarn ball is a whopping 175 meters long. That would be 12 DMC skeins per ball of yarn.
12 (DMC skeins per ball of yarn) x 13.50 (DMC skein price) = 162
162 - 35 (price of crochet yarn) = 127
So, you save 127 pesos! Subtract the amount you'll spend for dyes and that's still a hundred-peso worth of savings.
Another tip: Instead of buying different shades of dyes, stick to the 3 primary colors (red, blue, yellow) and mix them up. :)
If you're wondering why I chose such seemingly boring colors, it's because I'll be making US flag inspired friendship bracelets. Maybe I'll blog about that.
HOPE THIS HELPED!
