Dyeing in the Rain!

This is one corner of the piece of the multi-dyed one that I did yesterday. I was very pleased with how it turned out! The picture is a bit blurry and the other one I took even worse so it will just give a taste of what it looked like -- lots of large colored flowery images in it!



Well, I didn't intend to dye in the rain but of course the showers came just as I sat down to have some lunch. Some rain got on the piece before I covered it up with plastic so we may have something a little different. Unfortunately, the plastic had blown off so we had some premature washing out of the piece!! I don't know if there will be any color left on it at all! I may use the Afterfix to try to retrieve a little color as it looks pretty washed out right now. Darn.... Well, instead of the Afterfix, I threw the soggy wet piece into the microwave and nuked it for 8 minutes (2 yard piece). I then let it cool down and it is currently soaking. There is still some color but don't know how faded it is going to look. Tomorrow it is supposed to rain again.

Poor Lisa had planned to head to the beach in NC today to treat her visiting friends to a nice weekend as well as look at some beach houses. Wouldn't you know that an unplanned tropical storm would head exactly where she was going!! So she will get to see what beach houses do in the heavy rain!! I had just turned on the Weather Channel to check on our storm situation and saw the update on NC. It couldn't have been a minute later when she called to find out about the status of Hurricane Bertha (the original threat which wasn't). I had to break the news to her that a tropical storm had risen up overnight and was headed her way! Unfortunately, she was three quarters of the way there from Charlotte where she lives.


I have the three pieces from yesterday done and am moderately pleased with them. I think the blues one suffered from not letting it be long enough. It was the last one I did and the first I washed out. I didn't like the one with the purples at all so may just overdye the whole thing with yellow although I haven't decided yet. The first one I was very pleased with (the forerunner of which is on yesterday's blog). I like the serendipitous colors you get when applying some of all the primaries in different concentrations.


Today I am doing some experimenting. I made up sun yellow, golden yellow and strong orange and sponged strong diagonal stripes on the piece covering the whole thing. Then I applied turquoise mixed with a little intense blue all over the whole piece, lighter in some areas than others. I should get some different greens and browns with this. We shall see. I really was trying to see what the sun yellow and strong orange would do as I haven't used those yet.

This is the piece when I first applied the dyes before the rains came!

You can see that the salts were beginning to work their magic.

This is what I do with the leftover dyes from a day's dyeing. This was the leftovers from last week's dyeing adventures. I had hit upon a real gold mine in KMart with these tshirts which are women's and I swear are mercerized, they take the dye so well! I have bought pfd tshirts that didn't get this rich color from week old dyes yet! This was basically some leftover turquoise and intense blue, some mixing red and then a small amount of golden yellow that I inserted in some places that looked a little white!
This is the purple and blue piece from yesterday. Looks a little splotchy to me but it isn't ironed yet.

This is the blue piece which is mostly turquoise and some intense blue. I don't think it is as rich as it could be.