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The Good and The Bad

January 21st, 2016

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

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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.

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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.

Wordless Wednesday

January 20th, 2016

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Crazy Day

January 19th, 2016

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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:

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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.

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

 

Dyeing – Week 2

January 18th, 2016

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This week, we are doing gradations of the primaries – sun yellow, fuchsia and turquoise. I did a full 8 gradation of yellow because I use it quite a bit. I only did 3 gradations of the fuchsia and turquoise.

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I used plastic baggies for these.

I also did a blue gradation using Elizabeth’s divisive method: which involves beginning with all the concentrate at once, and then gradually reducing the amount of dye concentrate you pour over the fabric. These are still needing soda ash.

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Tomorrow, I will do the high water version to get a solid color – you can add salt to the water to help the process.

I broke down and bought a small fridge on Amazon. It arrived packed in 3 boxes and some stryrofoam. It was a comedy of errors watching us unpack it. I need to keep my dye concentrates cold and since I turn up the heat in the studio to batch my dyes, it was a necessity!

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I also finished the brown sweater set for my hair stylist’s baby boy, who is a red head.

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I am Dyeing to Show You

January 14th, 2016

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I think I mentioned that I am taking Elizabeth Barton’s online Basic dyeing class. Her method is new to me. You mix up a lot of dye concentrate to have on hand — we have done 6 colors. The soda ash is not added until the fabric has been in the dye for at least 30 minutes and you can wait until the next day. So, this week we mixed up our concentrates and then did a gray to black gradation. I think I like this method of having dye concentrate on hand, but I have to refrigerate it so I have ordered a cute little desk top fridge for my studio.

Here is my fabric batching:

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And here are my results. It is so hard to get grays and blacks that do not have purple or blue casts to them.

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I also would like to get more even coloring and not have the mottled effect – things to work on.

The other thing that has kept me busy is purchasing a new car. Mr C and I have made lots of changes in our life to bring down the cost of living on the planet to have more discretionary income in our retirement. Getting the Prius was part of that, but to be honest, we never fell in love with the Prius, for many reasons. So it is leaving us and we now have a beautiful small Class C Mercedes Benz. It was a loaner at the dealership and has very few miles on it and all the bells and whistles. We just love driving it.

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We decided we needed just one little splurge.

We also got a new mattress hoping it would help my sleep problems caused by my bum knees. I found this duvet cover which I love. It is reversible. Really looks great and suits our design aesthetic.

 

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