Adventure Quilter

In my last post I showed you several fabrics that changed dramatically when washed and dried. Thankfully, that’s not the norm. I thought you’d like some assurance that things DO usually turn out as I want them. A few examples:

Fat black and brown lines on white (which stayed white, I’m happy to say.) I like this pattern and think I’ll do more similar pieces.

This piece had a rather anemic, mostly-white background, which I didn’t like. However, there were some small teal patterns in the background and I decided I wanted the bulk of the background to be a solid version of that. Hooray for color matching!

This nearly solid red-orange requires a lot of restraint! With all the colors and tools at my disposal, it’s REALLY tempting to add more pattern and color! But, I occasionally manage to create such fabrics. Thank goodness, because they’re very much needed.

What kind of dyeing successes (or challenges) have you encountered?

Ellen Lindner

For me, the hardest thing about dyeing fabric is predicting the final color. I think maybe I need a crystal ball!

Case in point: I spent a lot of time getting this fabric just the way I wanted it. This is what it looked like wet. I was concerned that the delicate tone-on-tone area in the lower right might not show up, but was otherwise confident about the outcome.

However, this is what I ended up, once washed and dried.

As expected, I lost the detail of that one corner, but where did the MINT green come from? Not satisfied with this result, I retreated the fabric and tried again. Here’s the reworked version, wet. As you can see, I kicked up the background colors quite a bit.

And this is the final version. Which I like a lot.

I’ve gone to the trouble to make a TON of swatches, just so I could avoid this problem. However, I’m not measuring and weighing dyes, just trying to match proportions. It looks like I might need to be more exacting.

And here’s another one that gave me trouble. Wet:

Washed and dried:

Ugh! What ugly colors! So, I tried again. Reworked and wet:

That looked pretty colorful, but it ended up just the way I wanted.

I guess my “take home” points are:
1 – Trust my swatches and try to “measure” more accurately.
2 – Don’t stress when it doesn’t come out to my liking, because…
3 – I’ve gotten pretty good at reworking the colors. (Yay for me! That’s a silver lining.)

Of course, not all the dyeing ends up off-color. I’ll show you some first-try successes in the next post.

Ellen Lindner