Friday, February 19, 2010

Have You Seen a Blue Footed Boob?

These two pieces are the last of the blue and yellow with a little blue/violet thrown in for good luck.



Unlike the tropical bird which has pretty blue feet, dropping a cup of navy blue dye on your feet does not give the same effect! This is not quite as bad as the time I dropped a large bowl of unbleachable dye on my feet the night before heading to NYC though. At least this time it is only the bottoms of my feet but it did ruin a decent pair of marbled socks (well, maybe not). At least these MX dyes don't actually dye the skin, only the old dry skin (which trust me my feet have plenty of). All in the furtherance of snow dyeing!!

I had to make up some more dyes and am actually starting to run very low on some which is a good thing as they are beginning to age a bit. I still get decent results with 10 year old powdered dyes though amazingly! The ones with red in them seem to last the shortest amount of time which makes sense as they are the most reactive and will take the opportunity to exhaust themselves in any water they find.

So onward to some more greens, some browns and some golds. There is just no other way to get the effect on fabric that using snow as a resist does. As an added inducement, it actually then washes the exhausted dye from your fabric to some extent which makes the washout so much easier. Amazing....
Well, today, I decided to do a totally different color, so squirted on some nice bright sun yellow and then some golden yellow, topped off with ProChem's Basic Brown which I have always liked as an overdye. I have never been quite able to recreate the exact color using the pure dyes so it is one of the few mixed dyes I use. I also decided to fan fold a small piece of leftover fabric kind of on the side to see if it was any different than what happens with plain old low water immersion. We shall see. I took the lead from Gisela (http://artaddworksforme.blogspot.com/) who posted some beautiful results on Dyerslist (a must list for anyone who is serious about dyeing).

This was the "before" with the sun yellow, golden yellow and then basic brown squirted on top. In this pile were one of the large pieces plus the smaller fan folded piece kind of tucked around the outside.








This was the second of the two using the same palette.

This is the result on the fan folded piece. It is a half yard altogether.
This is one yard of the four yards I did. I pretty much liked them all but thought I might go a little lighter on the brown as I thought it blobbed a bit.



This is another of the brown and golds. I think it will be great to cut up for my lions.




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