Celebrating the End of Summer Dyer Style!

Well, a very hot day in upstate New York and like good dyers everywhere, we went outside and dyed up yardage catching that last bit of natural warmth before the normal gloom of autumn and winter hits.

Today, Barbara, Marcia and I went to her home, set up a rack and experimented with dyeing vertically rather than your normal horizontal style!! Barb and Marcia both had pieces made with this technique as well as a couple of pieces they had attempted earlier so we could compare and figure out how to do better. I took a great leap from what they had done and worked with wet soda soaked fabric. I just hand wrung it dry. For an experiment, I also worked with one piece that was totally dried but presoaked also with soda ash. I used some fabric I had bought at Joanns that was rayon and linen which I like for jackets. Barb and Marcia shared a bolt of fabric they had ordered from Dharma that was also a linen/rayon mix.

The results are not totally in yet as my pieces are in the dryer but even from the washout, my one suggestion obviously worked as there is even color all over the whole piece. Also, the ladies had not used squeeze bottles the first time so that seemed to work better as well. The dry one also appears to be a lot darker which I would have expected as well as you are basically dealing with more concentrated dyes. We had decided that deep color was really what we wanted in jackets. So far my least favorite piece is one that has a lot of bright reds in it. I think I can fix it so I will like it tomorrow by doing some overdyeing (but not hanging on the rack). The biggest problem with the rack was that the wind likes to blow it over with a big heavy piece of fabric on it. Of course, you almost died outside today in the sun without the wind. Eventually Marcia got smart and had us move to the shade. I think my pieces suffered from a desire to get them done as quickly as possible so I could sit in her cool comfy studio!!

I am thinking that the ladies will be pleased with their results but we shall see!!

This is Marcia painting her piece concentrating hard.
This is Beth's second painted piece.

This is Barbara painting her piece.

This is Barbara's big finished piece (after the painting).


This is another of Beth's painted pieces