community of dyers

Thank you so very much for responding to my question. I'll try all your suggestions and see how they work.
Ruth
Amarillo

Boiling nylon stockings with any acid dye would work. Acid dyes are common; for example, you can use Kool-aid unsweetened drink mix, because it has so much artificial food coloring in it, and food colorings are acid dyes. It also contains citric acid, so you don't have to add another acid such as vinegar for it to work. With a true textile dye, you'd want to add vinegar or another acid in order to dye nylon. Rit dye is not my favorite kind of dye, but it does work on nylon, when used with vinegar, and it's easy to find in stores.

Longer periods of dyeing result in deeper colors, and stockings that start out as different colors will end up different colors as the base color mixes with whatever color is added. For brighter colors, try to remove the existing color in the stockings before dyeing. You can't use chlorine bleach on nylon, but you can use a reducing-type color remover, such as Rit Color Remover. (See "What chemicals can be used to remove dye?".) Color removers aren't safe for children to work with, but an adult could do it.

Here's a link to a youtube video on how to make nylon stocking butterflies, and another link to a tutorial on craftster.org on how to make nylon stocking tulips.

I remember a similar craft when I was a child. We would twist wire loops to make flower petals, and then dip them in some sort of liquid material that came in small paint cans, like dipping wires in soap to make bubble shapes. The liquid plastic would dry to form delicate thin transparent colors of plastic. I wonder now how toxic the solvents used with that liquid plastic may have been. Using dyed nylon stockings on the wires seems like a safer craft, as long as adults do all the handling of boiling water. There's a booklet on Amazon showing the plastic film flowers, Dip Film Flowers, by James E. Gick: