Tag Archives | Dyed Fabrics

While dying fabric I’m learning a lot! Some of it comes from books and some of it I stumble upon.

Case in point, trying to mix thickened dye colors directly on the fabric. I had heard that they wouldn’t really mix in this way, but I was feeling lazy and had to give it a try. First, I tried it with a mixture of greens and some clear dye paste.

As expected, the greens were blotchy. But what was that lighter squiggly pattern? It was the clear paste, which acted as a resist to the other colors.

Bingo! That looked like something fun to play with.

So, I tried to repeat my results with a variety of colors and patterns. Red with circles, and pink with feathers.

Brown circles and orange spears/leaves.

Yummy! A quick and easy way to get a tone on tone pattern.

Ellen Lindner

Ellen Anne Eddy says, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” In other words, don’t expect yourself to master something right away.  If it’s worth doing it’s worth your practice time and whatever  mediocre results you get along the way. Well, I think maybe I was the poster child for this philosophy in my last dyeing session. It seemed like nearly everything I did was correcting something I’d done earlier.

Like this ugly green fabric.

Click any image for a larger view

I over painted it with fabric paint, using a commercial stencil and I got this. Much better!

Now, the paint shows more than the original ugly fabric and that became the norm as I worked through some other fabrics.

You may remember this GARISH one from an earlier dye session. That UGLY chartreuse needed to be covered! I made a stencil which would print most of the screen, leaving only a few dots of the underneath fabric showing. I tried mixing a deep berry/burgundy color, (which looked black when still wet,) and screened it on.

And it worked! After washing it out this is what I got. Just what I wanted. Woohoo! I love the imperfections.

Now I was on a roll. I began to look for ugly fabrics, like this clean up rag (CUR), and to figure out how I could mostly cover them. For this “stencil” I tried something new. I cut circles from freezer paper and lightly ironed them onto the back of my screen. I wasn’t sure if they’d stay, but they did (until I later washed the screen.) In the example below I screened on what I hoped would be a dark teal. (Since dyes are transparent, there’s often a good bit of guess work involved in such scenarios.)

And this is what I got when I washed it out. Yes!

I tried repeating my good results with the same technique, this time mixing what I hoped was navy blue and adding it to this bright, and very ugly CUR.

As you can see, the yellow below affected the color and it ended up being a greenish brown.  No worries. This will be very usable and is actually one of my favorite fabrics.

These are the results of my 2 week dyeing session: 42 pieces ranging in size from “hand towel” to 30 x 42. I’m, very happy with them.

I’m learning that this dyeing business requires some luck, a good bit of color theory, and an attitude of exploration. My kind of thing, for sure!

Ellen Lindner