Dyeing Day with Dianne

Not a lot of pictures with this blog as I managed to leave my camera at home!

However, Dianne decided she wanted to do one of my "extreme overdyeing" sessions (Extreme Overdyeing Technique).  We decided to do 1/2 yard pieces of fabric for each color.

The technique uses 10 dye pots to achieve 35 different colors.  You start with six pieces of whatever size you want in each of the pots, all with numbers A-0 through E-5 and an additional 01 -05.  First time around you put all the A's in one color, all the B's etc.  The second time you sort them by number and place in the colors leaving out the 0s from the first batch.

We used for the rows here, Dharma Wisteria (very very light lavender), Dharma Chinese Red (an orangey red), ProChem Mixing Red (a bluish red), ProChem Strong Orange (very strong orange and a pure color) and ProChem Sun Yellow (a nice bright yellow).  The columns were ProChem Basic Brown, ProChem New Black, ProChem Intense Blue, ProChem Deep Navy (pure color) and Dharma Turquoise.  I didn't have a scale and kept very poor track of how much was dumped into each pot but tried to approximate a tbsp for 5 1/2 yards of fabric which is roughly a 3% solution but I was VERY inacccurate!  In my bunch you can see one very un-pfd fabric the second from the right on the bottom row which should have been a nice deep green -- really obvious here!!

Unlike my usual process of putting the fabric in the pots dry, we wet them first so that we would get more patterning and color separation as water acts somewhat as a resist.  You can get even more patterning by soaking the fabric in soda ash first as well.  

Getting ready for a visit from my sister and her husband!!  Should be fun and hopefully they won't be too grossed out by the house!!