Monday, August 31, 2009

Dyeing with Friends

This past weekend I got together with three friends to dye fabric. Arlene has all the dyes, fabric and equipment so we do it in her driveway. If you had seen me Saturday night, you would wonder if any dye got on the fabric. I was certainly colorful!

Here's Nysha squishing dye around. This is before he just gave up on gloves and used his bare hands. He was pretty colorful too by the end of the day!
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This is the neat contraption Arlene's husband built to rinse the fabrics. It beats rinsing in a bucket, and uses less water too. That's Marge rinsing fabric, and you can see the tshirts hanging on the fence that I dyed. Also on the left that splotchy fabric - we decided to use fabric to mop up the spills on the table and then activate the dye. We got some pretty cool pieces of fabric that way!
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Here are my fabrics and Marge's fabrics marinating. We used procion dyes. What we do is called "color by accident", which means you will never be able to reproduce a color exactly. We measure about 2 tablespoons of dye powder to about one cup of urea water. And then we pour that onto about one yard of fabric. And leave it about 15 minutes, then add activator and leave that about one hour. You get the idea we aren't being real precise here.
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See the gorgeous fabrics on the fence? Nysha fan folded, then scrunched, then wrapped the fabric around a piece of PVC pipe and tied it and then drizzled different color dyes on it. How cool!
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More dye marinating in pans. Nysha did something called parfaits - you put a yard of fabric in the bottom of the bucket and pour a color on. Then put another yard on top and pour a different color on. Then a third yard and a third color, and then activate the whole thing. He got some really neat fabrics. I can't wait to see them washed and ironed. Washing them usually lightens the colors some.
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Here's more fabric being rinsed. Do you think we like intense colors? I was trying to do gradations from yellow to red. They looked great in the buckets but when I rinsed them, they turned pink. So I overdyed them and got orange with pink overtones.
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Here's our "supervisor", Arlene's husband Bill. He was nice to go get us pizza for lunch.
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And here's Arlene and Marge showing off Arlene's gradations of purple.
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