Strange Dye Results, What's Your Guess?

[Harry Marinakis]

I feel quite confident in my ability to dye leather. In fact, I often experiment a lot with dye mixes and mix my own custom colors. I use Fiebing's dyes exclusively.

Recently I wanted to dye some natural 2-3 oz. veg tan to match another piece of leather that was a medium brown with a hint of green, almost olive.

I cut off a piece of the natural 2-3 oz. veg tan that I was going to dye, and experimented with various dye mixes. I mixed up a 4 oz. bottle of dye and started tweaking the color. I settled on a brown/green that was a bit lighter than the other leather, but I planned to add some dark brown antiquing around the edges.

My custom color is attached below.

After a lot of tooling and preparation, I shook up my bottle of dye (a mix of Fiebing's Russet & Fiebing's Green), diluted it 50:50 with alcohol and dyed the 2-3 oz. leather.

It looked pretty dark when the leather was wet - but it stayed dark even once dry. Like dark chocolate. So dark that it looks black from 6 feet away.

Okay, what happened?

Edited March 20, 2016 by Harry Marinakis

[Jaymack]

50:50 isn't much of a dilution when it comes to Fiebings. I have mixed no less than 4:1 and as much as 12:1 with Fiebings oil dye.

[Harry Marinakis]

The dilution doesn't have anything to do with it - at full strength my color was olive (shown above), so at 50:50 dilution it should have been even lighter.

[Harry Marinakis]

Here are my dye experiments with full-strength dye, you see that the colors are not that dark.

The second photos shows the final results!

What the heck happened? The leather used in the dye test is the same identical piece of leather as the scabbard.

Edited March 22, 2016 by Harry Marinakis