Saturday, September 16, 2006

Experimental Day - the process Part 1

Here are the colours I'm using today, sitting in my studio ( aka the kitchen bench).
And here are one metre (one yard) pieces of fabric, already soaked in soda ash and laid out in various ways in trays, with multi-coloured dyes added. Normally I don't use so many colours, but today I'm making backgrounds to overdye and then play with my bleach pen on. So I want a range of colours underneath. The dyes have just been poured on at this stage, and not squdged. Squdge is a highly technical dyeing term - just kidding! !!! It's kinda the noise the fabric makes as you push it around in the liquid.

Here are the four trays AFTER squdging. Notice that they dyes don't all turn into a horrible brown mess like colours do when you mix them together. Now they're sitting and absorbing the colour for an hour or so. Then I'll rinse them, wash them and dry them, before repeating the process with a darker overdye.

I have a few half metre lengths which are drying on the line, as I plan to play with shaving cream dyeing on these. More photos coming! Posted by Picasa

3 comments:

Joyce said...

Your photos are inspiring. I have to get back to dyeing. I bought some fabric in USA when we were down there and still have to use it. How do you use shaving cream in dying??? I assume there is no razor involved. Lol.

Charleen said...

I'm interested in seeing how the bleach pens work. Wouldn't it take all of the color out?

Emmy said...

I am very interested howe it wil be and what the bleach pen wil do .
I have so much to learn on the dying of fabric