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Dying specialty fabrics is a lot of fun. Having said that, I don’t think I’m that good at it. And I DEFINITELY am challenged when it comes to using them.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

During my recent dye session I tried to create some specialty fabrics that could either be used together or that could be used as “anchor” fabrics for a quilt.

Like these two.

I was hoping to use them together. These are each 45″ high, so you can see that the scale is pretty large. I was excited about trying them.

I thought this one could be a good anchor fabric. The motifs are smaller, so it will work more like yardage – but not entirely.

I sorta love this blue/green one, below, on the left. It has the feel of yardage, but the large scale “spades” make it less so.

The one on the right looked better when it was wet. The yellow/gold background was much darker and richer. Maybe it will need some over dying down the road.

This fabric was made with something new to me: a mask. A mask is similar to a stencil, but the pattern doesn’t extend all the way to what would be the corners of a printing screen. Which means I didn’t want to screen print with it, because I’d get bit rectangles of color, with the delicate design masked out. Instead, I applied the dye loosely with the sponge. This allowed me to merge one color into another.

As you can see, I wasn’t careful about preserving the masked designs. Instead, I sponged over some of them with a later color. This gave interesting results. See what I mean in the detail shot below.

I was delighted with the results and will definitely play around with masks some more.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. Do you have tips on working with masks? I’d love to hear them.

In my mind there are two basic types of dyed fabrics: those that can be used for yardage, and those that have specialized patterns. These are a few of my yardage pieces. They fall into this category because I could cut pieces out of them in a variety of places and still get pretty similar designs.

This navy grid is an over dye. The original stripey blue was too dull for my liking, so I added navy on top.

The navy, green, and rust below are also over dyes.

This yellow fabric was a commercial fabric that I tried a lavender rubbing on. It DID NOT look good, but it mostly faded when I washed it. This time, I tried it with an orangey-red. I think it works and that it will be useful.

The navy print, above, was stenciled and the background orange was added last. I would have liked it to be a little brighter, so this one might get an over dye down the road.

I work with thickened dyes. The thickness allows me to stencil and paint with them, knowing they’ll stay where I put them, without bleeding. But, I like that bleeding effect, too, so I did an experiment to see if I could get thickened dyes to bleed effectively. I sprayed the fabric and dye painted the two sides in blue and yellow.

Then I scrunched the fabric up and left it that way to dry. I could immediately see that the two colors were, indeed, blending.

These are the final results. It definitely shows promise. I’ll have to play with it some more.

As you can see, this is just a tiny swatch, but I included it in this post, since I think it will be a yardage technique in the future.

Some of these yardage fabrics aren’t that exciting, but I usually find them to be quite useful.

Ellen Lindner

I’ve recently changed my dying process and I’m really liking it! The impetus was the book, Colour Your Palette, by Leah Higgins.

She mixes her print paste thinner than I’ve been doing and is, therefore, able to dispense her dyes from squirt bottles. I decided to give it a try, and boy do I like it!

At this new consistency, the dye flows out of these bottles beautifully. It’s VERY easy to control the dye and even to write and draw. Love it!

Another change is the addition of a glass mixing plate.

The mixing plate has a couple of advantages over my previous method of mixing directly on the plastic. 1 – I can make notes on a piece of paper underneath, which keep me organized when I’m mixing very specific colors. 2 – I can easily pick it up for cleaning and scrape excess dye into my trash can.

In the book, Leah Higgins walks you through six very extensive exercises which help you to learn all about mixing colors. The first one was to simply print each of your basic (8) colors in a variety of strengths.

That, by itself was really useful. But, Leah takes it one BRILLIANT step further. She has you make two identical samples. You wash one and leave the other one to dry and remain unprocessed. This will serve as an example of how different things look wet and dry. VERY useful!

See what I mean, below. The top colors, in the plastic bag, are completely untreated. The ones below are washed and dried. Look for the two swatches with the yellow pins in them. These are both Golden Yellow, full strength. But, notice how much the color hue and saturation changed when washed!

And here are the other 4 colors. Again, notice the two swatches with pins in them. They’re both turquoise, at half strength.

I’ve done many more swatches following Leah’s instructions. And I’ve had fun dying a variety of fabrics. More about that coming soon.

If you want to know how to mix your print paste to this same consistency, all you have to do is follow the instructions that come on the package of thickener. (I used the SH print paste mix from Pro Chemical and Dye.)

Ellen Lindner