These are my color wheel fabrics so far. As I expected the really potent orange dye made all colors in which it was used look more orange. I want to get a real red, a better yellow green and yellow orange.

You can see that I dyed a lot of fabrics that turned orange in my attempt to get the right colors. Here are the other fabrics from yesterday’s run. More orange! And I love that green which is yellow with black. I wanted a lighter shade of that.

So, I went back to the studio today and dyed three more fabrics. Here they are, marinating in my warm studio. I will get them in the morning and wash, dry and iron them. I think I got what I was hoping for.

I am finding this method of having dye concentrate ready for mixing and dyeing is going to work well for me. You avoid the mess of starting with dye powder every time.

I had a good time yesterday spending time with my Condo Quilter’s group. We had lunch and shared our work and did some critiquing. Mr C had to drive me as I am finding it more and more difficult to walk very far. Our hostess drove me to my studio, where I rinsed out my dyes fabrics to take home and launder. Then, Mr C came and picked me up. I find myself having a meltdown most every day as I deal with the pain in my knee. I am feeling slower and less mobile and am gaining weight and feeling crappy too often. But, as Mr C says, each day, I am a day closer to getting a new knee.

There you have it, an evenly died turquoise, accomplished by doing bucket dyeing and stirring and stirring and adding salt to the water.

While I was at the studio doing the bucket dyeing and stirring every 5 minutes for an hour, I decided to try using jet black to dye the dilutive way. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the amount of dye concentrate by 8 tbs!! I used 4 to start and should have used 12. I got some interesting results, anyway. Some of this will get overdyed.

That piece on the left was when I wondered what would happen if I mixed better black with jet black. But, I grabbed my blue concentrate by mistake! It is a very nice blue. I like it.

Waiting for our next assignment which will be dyeing the color wheel. That will be fun.

Today did not go as I planned so I made the best of it. Mr C took the new car to the dealership at 7:30 this morning to have a protective sealant put on it. He came home with a loaner and later, I asked him to take me to the studio to work on my dyeing. We got down to the lobby when I realized that my keys were in the car. Oops. So back to the condo, hoping it would not take too long to get the car back. Ha! It was 4:00. I did get lots of SDA work done which I often do at night.

As soon as I got the car, I ran down and rinsed out my gradations from yesterday and added some soda ash to the blue gradation. I put everything in a bucket and brought it  home.

It all got rinsed, washed, dried and ironed. I love that blue gradation which was done by the dilutive method, meaning a dye solution had water added going from dark to light. The other gradations are done by the additive method, adding more dye solution with each piece.

I got much better gradation with the dilutive method. I just love those blues.

Here is my 8 step yellow gradation:

You can’t see much change in the middle pieces.

And I did only 3 step gradations with the turquoise and fuchsia. It doesn’t really show, but I got some nice mottling on these.

I didn’t have time to do the high water dyeing in a bucket so I will go back and do that tomorrow.