Staining Wood With Rit Dye

There’s so many ways to color wood, from painting and staining and decoupage, you can create a variety of different projects  just by changing the color of the wood pieces you are using. Rit Dye is an easy way to add color to your wood pieces. If you’re familiar with wood staining, using Rit Dye should be pretty simple for you to pick up. Use Rit to coordinate the color with all your craft pieces for multi-media artas well as up-cycling old tired projects into something new and fabulous.

This technique is best for large pieces of unfinished, un-sealed wood. For smaller pieces, you can simply emerse the wood in your dye solution for a 10 seconds.

Here’s how to stain wood using Rit Dye:

Materials you’ll need

• Rit Dye in the color of your choice
• Old cotton cloth
• Rubber gloves

Steps to staining wood with Rit Dye

1. Cover your work area with some kind of water resistant covering – plastic table clothes or plastic bags work great
2. Depending on how strong of a color you want to create, you can either dilute your Rit in water or use as is.
3. Rub your dye solution/color directly on to the wood.
4. Repeat until you have the desired shade of color.
5. Let dry
6. Seal with a clear sealer to prevent color from running.

Tip: for large pieces of wood, you can pour the dye right on to the wood and then spread out using your cloth.

Dye wood with Rit Dye

Dye wood with Rit Dye - add the dye

Dye wood with Rit Dye - rub dye into wood with a cloth

Dye wood with Rit Dye - dip wood into dye

Dye wood with Rit Dye - once dry, apply clear sealer

I used a traditional chocolate brown dye to stain this wood, but you can use a variety of fantastic colors. The beauty of Rit Dye staining is the natural un-even coloring the wood picks up. You can add really neat color effects to your natural wood projects by staining with dye.