Adventure Quilter

One thing I’ve learned while blogging about my dyeing adventures is how to correctly spell the word. 🙂 Thanks to all you readers who pointed out the need for a letter E in the word dyeing.  I think I’ve got it now. And I hope you’ll excuse my misspelled pun in the title.

34 fabrics, (nearly 8 yards,) and two weeks later, I’ve put a healthy dent in my goal to learn about painting with dye. And I’ve got some fabrics that I’m quite happy with.  Some I over worked and some might benefit from more attention. But, mostly I’ve got very usable fabrics.  Here’s the collection.

It looks like I’ll need to add some yellow next time.  And probably some more neutrals.

Here’s a close up view of some of the fabrics pre-ironing.  The pretty pink one is a clean up rag.  (CUR in my notes.)

There are SO many different things you can do with fabric and dye.  Some of very quick, like washing on thin dye, or dunking fabric into a dye vat.  Others require a lot of time, with multiple layers, dry times in between, or tricky hand painting.  I know I’ve only scratched the surface of the possibilities.

Here’s a case in point.  I wanted to have a fuchsia motif with a blue background.  But, since those two colors are near-complements I didn’t think I should overlap them.  So, I stenciled on the fuchsia leaves and then painstakingly painted the blue on. Here it is in progress, with a little white intentionally left around each motif.

And here’s the finished result.

I love it, but I’ll need to find a faster way to produce such results.  I’m sure there’s a resist product I could add on top of the fuchsia so then I’d be able to just wash on the blue.  I’ll bet I could stencil the resist on, too.  That would be a lot better. I’ll have to research it.

As much as I enjoyed the dye painting I was really ready to put away all the plastic and switch my studio back to a SEWING one.  I just bought a new sewing machine, so I’ll finish stitching my current quilt.  (I AM anxious to start a project with those dyed fabrics, though!)

Thanks for taking this ride with me.

Ellen Lindner

I’ve created quite a few butt-ugly fabrics during my dying experiments.  (No offense to butts!)  However, I know that I can save most of them, so they’re only “problems,” until I can get around to rescuing them.  In the meantime, they’re teaching me what NOT to do.

Like screen printing with liquid dye instead of thickened dye.  Oops!  What was I thinking?  As you might imagine, the dye ran everywhere and was solid. Like the black top of this piece, which was supposed to have lots of hash marks.  When I shifted to teal I remembered to use the thickened dye.  Quite a difference, don’t you think?

How will I alter the solid black.? I’m thinking a bleach pen, but I’ll need to do some more research.

However, when I pulled up this screen and saw the ugly fabric I also saw an opportunity.  I laid another plain piece of white fabric on top of the saturated fabric (with a masking tape resist still in place,) and I got this.

That’s definitely usable and the part you can’t see is black and white stripes.

I’ll tell you what, I spent a lot of time getting this next fabric to be ugly.  That was “before,” but I don’t have a photo. Imagine garish red-orange and purple wide stripes with bright yellow narrow stripes.  Yep, that’s what I did.  Intentionally!  Woah, I could have given myself a seizure with the resulting fabric!

So, I decided to paint a thin dye wash over all of it in dark brown.  I did so, but it totally obscured the stripes. So, then I painted on clear water, sweeping off color with my brush, and creating a big pond on my work table. Finally, I squeezed it all out.  And I got the fabric above, which I can definitely use.  Whew!

Did I mention I’m learning a lot???

Ellen Lindner