Gradation Dyeing -- Easy, Easy

As I didn't want to do any more big overdyeing sessions for now, I switched over to doing some gradations of colors that I needed.  This was my first - Mixing Grey -  which is using a color that is no longer (and hasn't been for over ten years) in production at Pro Chem.  When I asked them about it at our recent quilt show, they told me to hoard every teaspoon as one of the colors used to make it is no longer available commercially!!  This dye is at least 14 years old and it still does an AWESOME job of giving you nice greys!!  As I used up a lot of my greys doing the Colin quilt, I decided to do a two yard/color gradation and a nine step gradation from about a 10% to .03% concentrations!.

The gradations are easily the most simple type of dyeing giving you lots of fabric  using low water immersion techniques.  See my posting on Gradation Dyeing (under popular blog entries on the side).  I have stopped using plastic bags as I have been dyeing larger quantities of each color and even the good bags don't hold up.  Luckily I have a lot of one gallon containers from various sources (a lot from my pH Plus containers from pool suppliers).  These will work just fine for up to about three yards.  Only a little arithmetic is required!

This is a gradation of Basic Blue.  This is the only one of the pure blues to be biased toward red instead of green (navy, mixing blue and intense blue all tend toward the green side of the spectrum).  I have always loved this color as it looks so much like good sky fabric.  I have a bunch of batiste to make into nightgowns and I think I will dye them this very pale blue shade.  This is a gradation of about 6% down to .01%.  Each of the gradations is double the concentration of the one next to it.  I have found, however, that to show the real difference in color, you just take every other one and then you get two gradations with a great deal of variety.

I have another forty yards scoured so tomorrow I will probably do some                 fuchsia/brown mixes as well as some fuchsia/grey and fuchsia/strong orange.  I may try a very very light green with the sun yellow and a mix of turq and basic blue in tiny concentrations.  You get such beautiful mixes when you use colors all from the same palette which for this set of dyeing seems to be a sun yellow/fuchsia/basic blue.  Not sure I ever did a complex overdye using these three colors.  Of course ice is beckoning me as well....