Sunday, December 30, 2012

Adventures in dyeing!

So a little while ago I got a procion MX dyeing starter kit.  I asked my parents for larger bottles of the 3 primary colors for Christmas and they got them for me (plus 10 yards of white fabric!!)  The starter kit also had black in it.

I thought the starter bottles were 1 ounce, so I asked for 8 ounces- it turns out they are like a half ounce, and 8 ounces is A LOT, so I should have dye for quite some time.  I think it has a shelf life of a year or two (but have read of it lasting up to 10!) so I'm going to need to go on a dyeing spree.

Christmas I had a good start at it, I wanted to do gradations and saw a tutorial of how to dilute the same amount of dye more and more in successive dye baths to get a gradation.  Sadly, it didn't work for me.  (Well, it kind of did on the blue, you can see it is lighter on the last one.)  But I did get pretty fabric.  There were 4 of each color, but I already broke into some of it for a fused quilt...so one yellow is missing.


So after doing that, I did some snow dyeing.  Snow dyeing is when you put the fabric in a container, pile snow on top of it and then put the dyes on it like a snow cone.  The melting is what determines the patterns in the ice.  In the above picture you can see the first two I did, with Radiance fabric (half silk).  I actually like the patterns on cotton better.  I love the orange (made with fuschia and yellow), which is good because I accidentally put in two fat quarters instead of one.
I also took a craftsy class and tried a few of the folded manipulations.  The black is just accordion pleated and folded in half.  The purple is folded like a flag and then a resist is created using jar lids.  I asked Kevin to take pictures, and really appreciate that he did (his camera is confusing, I can't use it much) but I don't think he did the best job of showing off the fabrics. (The green is snow dyed.)


For my gradation, I didn't plan to use a resist, but it came out like one on the Pimatex, the technique I used was putting them in large solo cups, but one of the resist techniques was scrunching in small cups, so I guess I didn't have enough room.  I also thought this little pattern was quite funny:

And like many dyers before me, I was looking for something else to dye.  I hate the white underwear that comes in packs of cute underwear (why do they always throw in white? I don't want white!) so I dyed all of them too!  They went into the snow baths with the fat quarters.  Now I love my adorable undies.  And we spiral tie-dyed a shirt.  Again, sorry you can't see the pattern, it looks awesome!




Also, none of these fabrics are PFD.  I prewashed regular fabric- this is all from Fabric.com and it all dyed beautifully.  I had written what was what, but other than the pink being Pimatex, I can't remember.  So my lesson learned: buy what is on sale, prewash.  I tried the Timeless Treasures Broadcloth, the Cotton Broadcloth ($2.98/yd!), the Cotton Supreme Solids, the Premium Broadcloth (kind of thick), and the Moda Bella Broadcloth.  Everything looked great.   I also dyed some Kona I had on hand.






















1 comment:

Kristen said...

love it! the snow dye is sorta hilarious, considering the 'material' must be so easy for you to get, but couldn't be imagined up by someone in the south.

Also, I'm with you on the undies.