Second Dyeing attempt

Edit: Okay I have messed up the links on this post and you can't click for larger pictures. I will get that fixed later, however. But for now... they don't enlarge.

Edit 2: The links are fixed now!


When you do dyeing the way I am doing it, you mix dye powder with water and urea to make dye concentrate. You then use the concentrate with warm water at the appropriate strength to dye the cloth whatever colors you prefer.

There had been left over concentrate from the first batch of dyeing I did and since it doesn't keep long at room temperature I wanted to use it up.

Since I had concentrated mostly on a single color from the dyes and not mixed them except on the last couple of pieces (which was really just the leftover dye water used a second time), this time I wanted to try mixing some colors.

I thought I'd start with Orange and I carefully began to measure out some of the red dye concentrate. Well, the cap fell off and dumped a bunch into my mixture, so I gave up on the measuring idea and decided to just sort of 'wing it'.

Here's my first attempt at an orange.

As you can see it's really more 'salmon' than orange.

Now trying to guess what color a piece of fabric is going to be from the color of the dye water is pretty much just a wild guess at best. The dye water may be vaguely the color you are looking for in a super concentrated way, but you really can't tell until the fabric is completely done and dry. That's why measuring is so important to acheive predictable results.

I could tell, however, even from the way the fabric looked that it wasn't the color I was hoping for, so I tried again and this time used more yellow.

This was more the effect I was going for and now I know that if I want salmon it's more red and if I want orange it's more yellow. :)

Next I wanted to try purple.

>This was definately purple, but I wondered if I could get lavender and so I cut back quite a bit on the amount of red and got this.

>There are some pretty lavender shades in there, but it ended up being much darker than I'd anticipated.

My next attempt was green.

>I thought this one turned out pretty much as I had wanted so I was really happy with it.

I had a lot of leftover dye and wasn't sure what to do with it, so I thought I'd try two experiments. I wanted to see if I could get brown. Well, my attempt at brown produced this:

>

Although there are some 'tanish' spots on it, it certainly isn't brown.

After all this I still had a lot of dye concentrate left, especially blue. I figured I'd just take one large piece and dump all the remaining dye onto it.

Here is the result:

>

I like this piece but one concern I have is the amount of concentrate I used ended up making it possible this will bleed. I had a white piece of fabric next to it and when it was wet it bled onto it. I washed it in Synthrapol again and it seems stable now, but it did make me a bit nervous about my other pieces. I'd checked them as told to in the book. The rinse water ran clear and they didn't iron color onto a wet white piece of cloth. It was only by accident I found that the color bled when wet and left next to another piece of fabric.

All in all I'm really excited about my experiments. Right at this time I don't mind a one of a kind results but I am sure eventually I'm going to want to reproduce them.

In celebration of my new passion and sympathy for anyone who read all the way to the bottom here I'm going to offer a little prize for anyone who leaves a comment on this post by Monday 6AM Pacific time. I'll send you a random piece of fabric from my next dye batch!