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
