Hi all,
I'm new to leatherwork and leatherwork.net and came here to get some info about old style dyes (and wasn't dissapointed!).
Based on the info found here, I tried some experiments on the almost magical coffee and steel wool combination. Looking for a darkish kind of brown, I brewed up two very strong medium dark roast coffees (125 grams of coffee to 1 liter of water), added some 000 steel wool to one of them, and had them simmering for some time until half the water had evaporated.
Here are the results for
1) veg tan leather and coffee, and
2) veg tan leather and coffee and steel wool.
In all pictures showing pairs, the one on the left is the plain coffee dye, the one on the right is the steel wool dye.
After 1 hour
After 12 hours
After 24 hours
Comparison between 1, 12 and 24 hours
Same sequence again, but now after an olive oile treatment...
I stopped (I hope) the dying process after 24 hours by rinsing it with a lot of cold water and now, after a week, the colours still hold.
Since this turned out to be a very interesting method I retried again with a darker roast of coffee but for some (to me unknown) reason, the colours came out quite more "lightly".
Colour penetration for the coffee-only variant is marginal; colour penetrations for the steel wool variant is total; see picture below...
Anyways, thanks to all you out there for pointing me in this direction and I hope you can use some of the info here.
Cheers,
Gleek
