Dyeing - The After

The experiment from yesterday turned out moderately well. I should add that my black kitty was intrigued by my dyeing and sat on the table the whole time I was working -- I was afraid he would try to drink the dyes, so I did cover up the pieces when they were batching! A little colored dye on him would not have hurt as he only has one little 1 inch round white patch on his belly. He of course insisted on sitting on the fabric while I was trying to take pictures. He definitely claimed all of it as his!


This was a 2 yard piece of cotton sateen (retrieved from my "what is it" pile) that weighed in at almost 400 gms. I used a 3% solution of MX Grape to dye the whole piece (lwi) (12 gms -- about a tbsp-- of dye in 4 cups of water). I then made up a solution of 12 gms (about a tbsp) of Basic Blue dye dissolved in 1 cup of urea water. I pour half of this onto the first 1/8 of the fabric and added 1/2 cup of water to the dye solution and mixed. Took 1/2 cup of this and poured onto the second 1/8 etc. doing this a total of 8 times. It was not too scientific, just eyeballing. I smushed the dye around so that it would cover the general area. I waited about 15 minutes and then carefully poured 4 cups of relatively warm (body temp) soda ash solution and gently smushed all the fabric again, trying not to move things around too much (I didn't do a very good job of arranging the fabric originally though). I then let it sit four about 4 hours before washout. I didn't do any more smushing after the initial soda ash addition (and probably should have as there were some light areas that obviously hadn't gotten hit with the soda ash solution). The whitish areas were not horrible though. The above is how I do gradations using separate baggies as well -- I have described that elsewhere in my blog.
I do love the color that the Basic Blue and Grape together though. Both are not especially intense colors, but together they become fairly intense and give you very nice blue/purples -- better than I have gotten with any other combination!

This was the Sun Yellow to Fuchsia gradation. For this I used 4 yards of the Egyptian cotton that I get from Joanns. It has a wonderful hand and dyes beautifully. For this, I initially dyed the whole piece with a 3% solution of sun yellow (12 gms of dye in 4 cups of water). I then made up a 1.5% solution of the fuchsia (6 gms of dye in 1 cup of water). I used a milder solution as I knew fuchsia would overwhelm the yellow. This one worked rather well I though although I wouldn't do four yards again probably. This may get overdyed -- am not sure yet. I think the effects you get with applying several layers of color are so much more interesting! An Intense Blue bath might be interesting!

Anyway, today it will probably be a gradation from yellow to one of the blues. We shall see!