Author Archive | Ellen Lindner

When dyeing fabric, there are always a few fabrics that don’t quite match my intentions. When that happens, I consider over dyeing them. Which simply means dyeing the whole piece a second time.

The background color on this one was just too pale for my liking.

So, I over dyed it with a diluted red.

Truly. It really was diluted! But, apparently it was stronger than I realized. No worries. I like it better than before and I’ll definitely be able to use it. Maybe I’ll soften it with a subtle stamped design in white.

This green fabric was not bad except for the red lines I had drawn on. They made it really ugly.

I decided to embrace the red theme by over dyeing with orange.

Hmm, well it’s better, I think. Very usable, but not that exciting. I think I’ll draw on some dark blue or black circles.

Did I mention that dyeing fabric requires patience? Yep. Patience to wait to wash out fabrics and then patience when additional steps or corrections are needed. It sure is fun, though!

Ellen Lindner

Updated July 1, 2021:

I used white transparent fabric paint and stenciled a ginkgo leaf design onto the red fabric.

I also used the stencil as a guide for drawing additional leaves with a permanent marker. I really like the effect. I think I’ll be doing more of that.

After seeing a photo of a red beet along with a yellow one, I got the idea to make a quilt in those colors. I set out to dye fabrics in a variety of beet/berry colors, along with some dull yellow ones. Thankfully, I had already done quite a bit of color swatching, so I was able to refer to my results as a reference.

These are my final results, and I’m quite happy with them.

I was really thankful for the color swatches. That’s because wet dye always looks different from the washed and dried version. Especially with strong colors.

Take this piece, for example. I was aiming for a variety of beet/berry/grape colors, all in the same fabric. Although it was hard to see the variations in colors, I trusted my swatches and mixed the fabric dye colors accordingly. This is what it looked like. NOT reassuring!

But, this is what it looked like dry – almost exactly what I wanted.

It turns out that my dye mixture was a little thin, so the stencil motif blurred somewhat. But, actually, I like the imperfect effect quite a bit. Here’s a detail shot.

I’m looking forward to using these fabrics!

Ellen Lindner
P.S. The color swatching is an exercise in the book Colour Your Palette, by Leah Higgins.