You Just Never Know - Journey of a Dyer!

An art quilt friend asked me to do some custom dyeing for her which I do occasionally (but very selectively). She wanted a very muted beige/brown background with subtle mottling -- she always gives me the photo she is working from as a guide. As I was trying to get up a group of this color myself for the lions, I gave it a first try.

For my dyeing, I almost always use Preferred for Dyeing (pfd) fabric but have found that for lighter colors and overall "solidity", sometimes a good non-pfd fabric will work well -- some of those that have some permanent press finish or some optical brighteners. The finish acts as a resist and you get some nice overall colors sometimes (especially those pesky lavenders that you want to have some blue in). So I decided that this would be a good fabric for doing my friend's request. It was a non-pfd white Robert Kaufman Kona that I got at Joanns. I keep a small stash of the white for my marbling and fabric painting as it performs well in those capacities.

So I went with a pretty low concentration (maybe 2% for bright yellow and golden yellow) on this fabric and then added in Pro Chem's Basic Brown (one of the few "mixed" colors I regularly use). I only added about 1/2 to 1% of this. I figured I would get nice and light. Wrong!! It acted just like a pfd fabric and sucked up all the color and I got a very deep gold color. You can see this in the first picture above!


I knew the above color would not do so took one of my snow dyes to her with which she was thrilled! So now I am left with 6 yards of deep gold, some of which I can use. I had a bunch of the basic brown left (although it has been aging down there in liquid form in the basement) so added a tsp of Deep Black to the solution this morning and poured it over 5 of those six yards. The result is not too bad! There was obviously no permanent press or optical brighteners in this batch! I got good mottling and a lot of very deep browns. These two pieces are the results -- one is two yards and the darker one is three yards.

I have another 10 yards of it all scoured and ready to go. I am thinking some reds and oranges overdyed with browns and blacks. I am doing things a little differently also. I have a couple of big flat boxes and I am scrunching the fabric and covering the bottom of the box. 5 or 6 yards fit easily into one of the boxes.

I am doing LWI the Ann Johnston way with just wetting the fabric (usually I use it dry) and then pouring the dye all over it and then messaging it in. I am of course pouring the dye very unevenly but doing a lot of message to get the subtle mottling but an overall variation in color. I let it sit for 15 minutes and then pour in the soda ash solution and message a little bit. I then weight down the fabric with another box with a bucket of water in it. I really like using baggies as it is easier to squeeze out the air and get overall coverage of the fabric but this is working pretty well! I let it sit for about 2 hours, rinse, wash and iron!

Won't these two fabrics above work really well for my lion's mane? I was planning on doing a lot of piecing but these almost stand alone with lots of stitching. Nah, will still piece!