More Dyeing and Playing

More on our dyeing adventure from the other day. We had a lot of different types of materials to try - all cotton but different textures.

 Mary brought floss and Perle cotton to try and it was fun to create our own variegated thread.

 We laid it in a tray and chose 3 colors that would blend nicely together

 We added them using a foam brush, let it sit for around 5 minutes and then added the fixative. We nuked them in the microwave for a minute....

 and voila!!  The results - top 2 rungs

 Another thing we did which was one of our favorite techniques - pleating and dyeing. The fabric was first soaked in a soda ash solution and then pleated. We used a smallish micro-waveable container and laid the fabric around the edge.

 We added dye and tilted the container slightly to let it roll into the outside perimeter. You can see the wicking of the blue into the fabric.

 We let it wick for a few minutes and then removed the fabric.  We added another color to the tray, flipped the fabric over, put it back in the tray so the white side was in the dye; we let it wick into the color on top - here the blue. After letting it set for 5 minutes, we nuked it in the microwave for 1 minute.

What's so fun, is sometimes the colors will meet in the middle and create a third color and sometimes they won't and you have a nice white strip which sets them off.  Either way, it's always a surprise to see what you get. Here are some of the result, this was Kates...

 and this was Marys. She used wool to experiment and it came out spectacular - the favorite among us!

All results were beautiful.  On this one you can see a slight halo of green where the blue and yellow meet.

 We also tried some cotton batting.  In the above tray, Kate added more dye and it came out beautiful and intense.

The others we used more as clean up fabrics to see that would happen, we could have used more dye.
Still more to come, so please come back and visit.