Dyeing, Dyeing, Cont.'d...Still Not Done

Well, we had all sorts of things being batched in the basement. I also have one red arm and one very fuchsia finger (got to figure out which of my right gloves has a hole in this finger.... You will have to forgive the pictures of un-ironed fabric as husband insisted he needed to do laundry (how dare he!) and I had to give up the washing machine before putting them through the second cycle. A lot of ironing to do tonight!!



I noticed that I had never done a gradation of the Black 609 (the deep black from ProChem) so started with that. I then overdyed all those Sun Yellow/Basic Brown gradations from yesterday in a 5% fuchsia bath. Then I did four yards of plain old Tangerine at about 2% thinking I might be able to use that straight on the lions. If not, I can always overdye. Then I got to the meat for the day! I did a gradation of Tangerine (truly one of my favorites of the pure dyes despite its tendency not to dissolve easily) with a constant of .5% basic brown added to each.


Then I had a bunch of fuchsia and Mixing Red and Basic Brown left (only a little bit of that -- about 100 ml of 10% solution). So I threw that altogether for probably about a 15%(with about a 10:1 of red to the basic brown) intensity and did a gradation (I did 9 steps but probably could have done 12). I am hoping the darks will be a really dark red but we shall see!! Really dark rich red is a bit elusive with these dyes!


This is the Tangerine gradation with a constant addition of .5% Basic Brown. I really liked it and think I will do a gradation of one of the colors in the lighter values to give me more lion colors.

The 2% Tangerine bunch was much too bright so they will have to get overdyed today.


This is the crazy mixed up mixture of Mixing Red and Fuchsia with just a touch of Basic Brown. I think I have hit upon something here!!!! I am always complaining about Fuchsia striking too quickly and never giving good overall coverage. Mixing Red does a better job of playing with other colors but Fuchsia is a much brighter color. But mixing the two together, you get the best of both worlds!! I don't think I have ever gotten anything with Fuchsia in it to grade so nicely without a lot of splotches. This is all low water immersian dyeing by the way. The deepest reds in this gradation were very nice as well and I think the Basic Brown did some of the work there.

This is the former gradation of Sun Yellow with the 2% Basic Brown that I didn't like. I overdyed it with 5% fuchsia so I would get good coverage. I am very happy with the results although the differences between the different pieces are small as I would expect! I can always use some nice dark brick-y colored fabrics and am very pleased with this! My camera really rebelled at taking this picture -- my husband thinks that some of my colors are absorbing all the Infrared that cameras use to bounce off and determine focus. I have had this problem with a couple of other colors as well.