Back to the Dye Pots - Brown or Bust!

Well, have finally gotten back to the dye pots and used up some of my week old leftover dyes to dye socks which I haven't done for awhile. I also grabbed some of my yellows that I had dyed some time ago and overdyed some of those as well as some other random fabrics that I had lying around. I like to see what happens! I got some really pretty green fabrics in this bunch. So I also have some nice blue and green socks to match the jacket fabric I made at Marcia's!! Two pairs are a little light so I may just overdye them. These socks are from Dharma and take the dye quite well although you can see the elastic a little with the darker colors. I think I bought 2 or 3 dozen the last time I ordered! They last pretty well although I have managed to wear a hole in the big toe on a couple of pairs -- too much walking! Each pair is 56 grams so doesn't take a lot of dye to color them up nicely!

I want to get started on my next Yellowstone pieces so wanted to dye up some browns and greys. I used the natural colored fabric which was probably not a good idea for the greys which are definitely on the warm side now. I may do another batch with bleached white fabric. The natural colored fabric is fine for the darker colors but as it does have a slight hue to it, doesn't do as well with the lights. I at least have a good idea of how light I want to go though (very light). I decided to try to do a gradation of browns using my leftover mixing blue and a 2% solution of strong orange. They aren't out of the dryer yet but I am loving what I have seen so far. It goes from a dark ocre to a deep brown that is almost black -- just what I was going for.

I have found that I like to do gradations where I basically use two different dyes. I keep one constant throughout the whole gradation and I make one variable. Because the low end of the gradation has such light colors, it looks like you are moving from one color to another many times. You have to be careful what colors you choose and what concentrations to use.

Laziness has overcome me in the washout process now. I now rinse in warm, cold, and cold and then move to hot wash with Synthrapol and then two more warm rinses. If I am selling the fabric, I will put it through one more hot wash and one more rinse to make sure there is no more color.

Tomorrow I am going to do some yellow overdyed with blue/violet to get some more browns. The blue/violet/yellow mix gives some very interesting browns. I am then going to do a sequenced overdye with probably the darker blues and orange in different concentrations -- I really want to get some fairly light ones so may have to play a bit more.

This is the group that was the randomly dyed fabrics, just pulling out some already dyed pieces that were either yellow or poorly dyed the first time. There is one commercial fabric in there as well which I overdyed blue and another piece yellow.


The below groups are the ones that were dyed with mixing grey (left) and then the orange/mixing blue on the right. The colors of the browns are better in person than they show on the computer. Can't seem to adjust them to the right colors on my monitor at least!