As you can see, I got some beautiful fabric, but the color magnet did not work that well because my dye was too concentrated. Here you can see very faint circles that I screened on to the silk.
Here is the cotton – none of the stenciled designs showed up. I need to do a more dilute dye solution and then, where the dye magnet is, the color will be darker. Back to the studio!!
I have been making short trips to the studio to try out an experiment on silk and on cotton. It involves dye painting so I first soaked small pieces of silk and cotton in soda ash and water.
I hung the fabric to dye and went back this morning to stencil some patterns on the fabric using Jacquard’s Dye Magnet. It is really goopy, slippery stuff so it is hard to get clean images.
I left it to dry and went back this afternoon and spread some full strength dye concentrate on the fabrics, which I had layered. I covered it and will leave it to batch for at least 24 hours.
I have been on a quest to get a periwinkle blue fabric. This is the closest I have gotten. At least the darker piece is close to what I have been wanting. I added the tiniest bit of fuchsia to blue dye.
I also squirted a melange of dye on some cheesecloth, just to see what I would get. And, I love it.
I am still feeling mopey and having good and bad days of pain. If I go to the studio and take a walk, it seems to be too much for my knee. I then have to spend the next day, doing as little as possible. I have gotten this much done on the sleeves for Paige’s Winnie the Pooh sweater.
I am going to work on doing a stitched collaged, using some of the demo fabrics I did for our printing class at Trinity. I want to give the students an idea of how to use their fabrics. Maybe I will have something to show tomorrow. I spent leap year day doing very little.
I went back to the dyes to try to get that purply blue that I call periwinkle blue.
It is the blues that you see as 2 and 3 in the top row.
I overdyed a light blue and medium blue with fuchsia and I also mixed up a blue and fuchsia which I used to dye white fabric. I didn’t quite make it so I will go back and try again. I do love that purple that I got.
That is all I have for today.
I am quite happy with the colors that I mixed to dye specific colors. I find that this is something I love doing.
I was thrilled with my citron/chartreuse pieces. I used yellow with just a smidge of black. The blue is not quite where I want it. I need to add a bit more fuchsia to get a cooler blue. As a reminder, here are the colors I was going for. The fabrics in the photo below were already in my stash.
I finished my Fuzzy Wuzzy cowl, but not without a bit of a problem. I didn’t leave enough yarn to bind off so I had to pull out a couple of rows.
I have been pretty busy with SDA work for the last few days. Not much time for other stuff! My knee is behaving so that is good.
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