A Few More

Since I do my fabric dyeing outside on the patio, the days are numbered for this season. Here are some pieces from last week. All are fat quarters. I dyed a few bigger pieces this year, but as I was exploring ice dyeing, there were just too many folds and dye combinations I wanted to try. As it is, I dyed a total of about 30 yards this summer.

More Ice Dyeing

July was a tough month. But I did some more dyeing as weather and events permitted. Here are some of my favorites.

Corner twist, Avocado.

Corner twist, Kingfisher Blue.

X-fold.

Accordion twist.

Corner twist.

Corner twist, Dances with Raisins.

Folded mandala.

Ice Dyeing

I'm half-way through quilting something, but haven't touched it for a couple of weeks, for a variety of reasons. Instead I've been learning and practicing ice dyeing. I've read about it before, but signed up for an online workshop from Susan Purney Mark in June. The weather has only allowed me to dye about once a week, but it's been fun. I love how simple twists and folds, combined with the ice, create intricate patterns. You never know exactly what you're going to get!

Here are some of my favorites so far:

Twisted from both corners.

Same dye colors as above, but accordion folded in both directions. 

Two dye combinations, each in a corner twist and an accordion fold. 

Twisted mandala.

Folded mandala,

T-shirt with accordion folds and triangles. 

Fabric Dyeing

Between traveling in August and drought conditions, I put dyeing aside for a time. But there were some nice days in early September, and I got a little more done.

I dyed a Seahawks themed t-shirt for a friend, and used some of the extra dyes on the first and third pieces here. I also tried a new blue violet dye (second), indigo (fourth), and a sage green (fifth). The sage was disappointing, so drab. 

Here is a progression from Deep Yellow to Grape. The last two didn't have as much yellow as I planned because I ran out of dye. I will have to get more Deep Yellow; not only was it a really pretty light orange by itself, but it mixed really well with other colors. 

I usually do pretty intense colors, but I wanted some lighter or medium shades. Here is Cerulean Blue in two lighter tones, and Blue Violet. The Blue Violet not only splits a lot, but with less dye in the water, left lots of white space.

Stack of all fabrics dyed summer of 2015. I also dyed multiple t-shirts, a dress for Ann, and over-dyed some older garments. 

I've really been wanting to try ice dyeing, and finally made a first attempt. This shirt was folded down the middle, then scrunched and swirled. I used some of my drabbest dyes, but ones I knew would split: Havana Brown, Khaki, Sage, Eggplant and finally Cerulean Blue. I thought it was a disaster in the making. It looked very dark brown, almost black, with just a few spots of pink during the entire washout process. But when it was done drying, I fell in love with the patterning. It still has a pretty drab appearance overall, but up close you see all the intricate color changes. I will definitely be trying this again on fabric, hopefully sooner than next summer. (I'm trying to work out how to set this up indoors.) 

Purple

Purple seems to be a difficult color to dye. I tried several variations the other day, and while the results may be useful one way or another, I still haven't got exactly what I want.

Here we have Grape plus a little red, Grape plus a little blue, Grape plus a little more blue. Grape is a pure MX color, so it's a good starting point.

Here I mixed Cerulean blue with different amounts of red. They came out darker than they appear here, kind of stormy or mysterious looking. 

Changing Clothes

By over-dyeing! I had a few old garments that I was taking to Goodwill. Took a second look and a couple of them were all cotton. They were blah and had light stains (also too small), so it wouldn't hurt to try giving them a new look.
Here's the before:

An off-white blouse with some yellowing around the collar and shoulders. A basic khaki skirt. 

The skirt dyed rust, with areas of light blue-gray (actually lighter than the photo). I had bundled some areas with rubber bands as a resist. 

The first attempt at dyeing the shirt was pretty awful. It looked like a very pale chambray blue that had been used to clean up an oil spill. 

So I over-dyed it with rust. It's still not great, but much improved from before. 

And the 2 items sort of go together. They still don't fit though, so I'll see if someone else wants them! 

More Colors

These are from a couple of different dyeing sessions. It's been so hot that the washouts take 2 days - 1 day to do the rinsing and soaking, then in the washing machine and dryer the next morning, I don't like running the dryer in the afternoons/evenings when it's in the upper 80s or over 90.

Assorted red values, some with a little bit of grape added, and one with yellow dripped on first.

Blue and green t-shirts. I got some really nice greens by mixing turquoise with deep yellow. I want to make yards and yards of it. Just to stare at :). 

Session 2

Yesterday I dyed some greens. I started with Deep Orange and Turquoise mixed together, but with more Turquoise than orange. Opposite proportions from what I had done earlier. I thought I would get teal, and the dye solution looked teal, but instead it came out a muddy blueish and a muddy almost maroon, both with splatters of turquoise. Mixing complements in nearly equal proportions is supposed to result in muddy colors, but I thought I was weighted more towards turquoise. Guess not!

The others came out much nicer. I used Deep Yellow with Turquoise. The one on the left is more blue-green, the others go more towards olive. It's difficult to get the true colors photographing outdoors. In the sun, they wash out; in the shade, they get too blue. But I really liked these, and this morning I dyed some shirts using the same combos. 

Dyeing 2015

Time to start playing with color again! June was too hot to breathe, and it's taken awhile to recover from that hot spell. But shirts, fabric and some new dyes arrived last week.

Fire red mixed with small amounts of Golden Yellow.

Deep Orange with Turquoise. Trying to replicate some fabric I made two summers, and it's almost there.

Deep Yellow and Indigo. 

6 half yards of fabric. I forgot one of my personal rules/guidelines, and that is to dye fabrics of similar hues at the same time. It is very easy to mix any color you want to try, and use them in separate containers. The difficulty comes in the washout as they have to be rinsed and soaked separately until most of the excess dye is gone. This becomes tedious. If you do similar colors in the same session, then they can be soaked and washed together and it's much easier. I did that today.

End of May

Time for one more finished quilt in May! This one got put on the back burner several times, as I worked on higher-priority items. I was looking at the pile of hand-dyed fabric on my sewing table and thinking that I should really do something with at least some of it. Especially if I want to dye more this summer. I sorted through them for awhile, and then did this. It started with the center strip, which was my first attempt at shibori. As shibori, it was a failure: the colors mostly bled into each other except for the orange, which just made blotches. But when I looked at it as if it were an abstract painting, I liked it. I pulled other fabrics to go with it, all hand-dyed by me except for the dark teal at the ends and 2 small strips near the center which is a Kona solid.

For the quilting, I did squares on the diagonal, and filled every other row with echoed blossoms, and different line designs. 

Linking to Crazy Mom Quils for Finish It Up Friday. 

Baby Stuff

Although I already made one quilt for Emily and Seb's expected little one, it was a little on the large and loud side, especially when I learned that they preferred a color scheme of navy and gray. I played with a few ideas, but decided to keep it really simple and have solid navy on one side and solid gray on the other. Quilted with a variegated King Tut thread on the navy side and a coordinating So Fine on the gray, this allowed me to practice some free motion quilting without regard to seam lines. I used In the Beginning's Modern Solids line in Indigo and Lead. This cross-weave fabric is much softer than other solid fabrics I've used, and combined with a thin, 100% cotton batt, made a really nice crinkly baby quilt.

I also made 2 baby slings with fabric that I hand-dyed. The first is an organic cotton twill which is very soft and cozy, but was perhaps a little too thick for pleating and running through the rings.

The second is an Essex linen/cotton blend. I know this fabric is popular with a lot of modern quilters, but I've never used it before. I may have to dye more and use it for a quilt in the future.

A Little More

I got a couple of longer pieces of fabric to make into baby slings. One was a linen/cotton blend, the other a twill. I dyed the twill with diagonal stripes of blue and the rest wine-red, but I didn't like it much. There were streaks from applying the dye, and the colors didn't blend much at the edges. I decided to over-dye, but in what color? I didn't want to make it worse instead of better. Luckily, I had dyed a small piece of the linen blend in the same colors at the same time, so I cut that into 4 pieces and dyed each a different color: black, blue, grape and eggplant.

The markings are not quite the same on the linen, but the colors were. 

Black, blue, grape, eggplant. I chose to go with the grape: thought it looked best, plus matched the rings. (Eggplant is a mixed dye from Dharma that is a very grayed purple.)

I also dyed some rusts. Tried to get this color earlier this year as well as last year by adding the complement blue or turquoise to orange, but only got browns. Nice browns, but not the rust I was going for. This time I added small amounts of black or khaki or eggplant to mostly orange. Can hardly tell them apart, or which one had which additive. But at least now I have something to counter all the blues and greens I've dyed. 

More Color

Catching up from dyeing sessions almost two weeks ago... Then there was a break due to inappropriate weather.

Purple/pink t-shirts. These were streaked and dribbled with dyes in close shades. The smaller one on the right is ok, but the larger one is pretty splotchy. The material is coarser. (I'm debating whether to over-dye the larger one in something like dark blue.)

T-shirts with spiral designs in muted teal and olive. The colors are nice, but way too much white. I over-dyed these later with diluted colors in the white areas, but diluting the muted colors made them pretty blah. I think I need to do something different, like adding salt, when dyeing shirts or any thicker cloth. The bare bones method I've been using works fine on lighter-weight cotton for quilting, but doesn't penetrate enough on the thicker fabrics. 

The purple dyes on yardage with manipulations. The top and bottom pieces were previously dyed a minty green. 

Blue, teal and olive dyes with different techniques. These are the same dyes that I used in the Seahawks group, but with the addition of black or khaki to make them muted. These should be fun to play with!