13 July 2011

to dye for


Here are the results of my dyeing class:



















































First the buckets where I soaked the fabrics (twice) one by one, then the finished fabrics. The last is the one piece of tie-dye. It isn't anywhere near as bright as I expected, but it's okay for a first piece.

11 July 2011

Dyeing

As I said in the previous post, I took a dyeing class on Saturday and spent most of Sunday with my hands in water, rinsing in cold water and washing in hot water until the water ran clear. Today, I decided enough's enough and chucked everything into the washer. Since I have a front loader and a pretty new one at that, I don't think I'm wasting all that much water compared to running the sink full 5, 6 or more times.
There are some winners and too many losers (for my taste) among my dyed fabrics and I still don't have pictures of the finished product, but I put a few pictures of the rinse buckets on FB:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150248434143129.320764.708398128&l=9a2b0c2265
Hopefully, I'll get around to taking more pictures this week.
And it's not as if I need yet another hobby, but I wanted to learn to make dyed silk scarves after seeing them at a farmers market (and being a bit shocked over the price), walked into Dharma Trading and saw the class samples and decided I had to try it. Lynn Koolish taught and I already signed up for the intermediate class.

10 July 2011

MIA

I didn't realize it's been over a month since I last posted. It's not that I've not been doing anything, it's more that I still haven't made friends with PSE. There's been a lot of sewing going on - but no pictures.
Yesterday, I took a class on dyeing and I seem to be spending today with my hands (in gloves) immersed in water, lots of water. I'm reluctant to put multiple pieces into the same bucket for soaking and so it's taking a long, long time and an extraordinary amount of water. There seem to be a few successes (Jerry Garcia would like some of my stuff) and a few failures. Not sure what went wrong, maybe the dye solution was too old? Once dye and soda ash solutions get mixed, there are only 30 minutes to use the stuff, after that, all bets are off.
There just might possibly be some pictures in the near future.
Until then, I uploaded to flickr and, after a rather long and painful process, managed to upload the flickr badge to the sidebar.