Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Trying to Squeeze One Last Day Before the Cool Weather Returns!


This is the finished sponge piece from yesterday. The other piece was nice as well but my picture was weird so I didn't post it. The color is definitely better in this one so will ratchet the dye concentrations up next time I am playing.

Well, I was very pleased with yesterday's efforts and will go with an even higher concentration next time (after my guest leaves and the hot muggy weather returns). I made up a little more of some dyes today and took a chance to get something going before it rained. Well, it started raining so in came the tables with their cargo. It is pretty dark as I used three primaries in sequence. First I sponged golden yellow over the whole piece (after dampening with a spray of urea water), then intense blue and turquoise and then some mixing red.


The fabric that has been used in all of these salt experiments is either the high count broadcloth from Testfabrics or the Egyptian cotton (also a nice high threadcount broadcloth) from Joanns. I rarely use anything but a nice pfd Pimatex or high thread count mercerized cotton for direct dyeing of which this salt dyeing is a subset. It might be interesting to try something else which I will do one of these days. I try to use the highest quality cotton I can when doing these labor intensive direct dyeing activities.

We shall see how it all turns out!

This is how it looks now. The white spots are the salts. I used all different sizes today whereas yesterday they were more uniform in size.



This is a closeup of the piece today where you can see some movement in the lighter areas. Much of this piece is very dark so don't know whether anything is happening or not and probably won't know until it dries out. It is sitting in the sun right now still wet but it is supposed to cool overnight.

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