Happy Valentine’s day everyone… in celebration of the day, I bring you reds and roses….and to find out why there is dye in the snow, keep reading!

One of the things that has frustrated me is getting the visual texture I want in my dyed cloth. I know how to get intense scrunch and markings, but a lot of the time, fabric like that is too visually busy for the way I work and make quilts. I want a softer, more subtle color shift. So, over Christmas (yes, that long ago), I did an experiment using four different red dyes and one yellow on a 12×21 inch piece of fabric. Where the fabric is striped, the dyes were painted on in the same sequence across the cloth (even the vertical piece…the stripes are just skinnier)

Here is the whole bunch:

The techniques I used are as follows….. in the next photo,

–top sample is dry cloth, set flat, with dye painted on, left for 30 minutes, then soda ash solution painted on

–lower sample is dry cloth, set flat, using activated print paste mix (in other words, mix up print paste, add soda-ash-solution and dye) painted on with a sponge brush

In the next pair,

–the top sample is fabric soaked in soda ash solution, placed flat on the table, and dye painted on; note the sharper patterning than in the painted-on version above

–the lower sample is “snow dyed.” Good thing I did this in December as it has been warmer in January than in December! Anyway, you are supposed to pour dye on snow, let it freeze, pick up the chunks of dyed snow and place them on your cloth. Bleach. This is a candidate for the rag bag… an interesting concept but boring results I think…

In the next photo,

–top sample is dry cloth placed (sorta bunched) in tub, dye poured on, set about 30 minutes, soda ash solution added

–lower sample is cloth soaked in soda ash solution, scrunched, and dye dribbled on (note a sharper pattern of crystals)

Saving the best for last…..

–the upper photo is fabric that was soaked in soda ash solution, then allowed to dry completely. Then it was laid flat on the table and dye was painted on.

–the lower photo uses Robbi Eklow‘s drip-dye method, featured in her book Free Expression (available here at Quilting Arts) in one of the most useful appendices to a quilt book in a long time (and great stuff on my favorite, quilting, in the rest of the book!).

I really like smooth transitions and soft color, so it is no surprise that the first piece and the last are my favorites (in the overall photo at the top of this LONG post, the top and bottom pieces on the left side). I also rather liked the texturing from painting on soda-soaked-and-dryed.

You can’t just throw out extra dye, you have to use it… it’s an immutable law of nature. So I grabbed a yard of pure white PFD (Prepared for dyeing) fabric and a near-yard of lemon yellow fabric someone gave me, which I wanted to overdye as it was a plain old solid. Here’s how they looked to start:

Then I added dye…. yellow all over (a warm yellow) and let it set and soak for a while. Then I dribbled a blue on one long side and a red on the other long side and let them work their way towards the center. I placed two small pieces of cloth flat on the top, too, to wick up the color. After batching for a while, I poured off the excess dye and added the soda-ask-solution to “fix” the dye. I poured off the excess dye first because I didn’t want it to “float” and homogenize the color. Finally, I washed them out…. here they are in a synthrapol wash in the sink:

After rinsing and nearly drying, I ironed them up and put them up on the design wall… I’m in LOVE!

The fabric on the right is the one which was initially pale lemon yellow. The fabric on the left / underneath is the white fabric. From the difference in tone and shading, I’m guessing the yellow cloth wasn’t mercerized, as the colors aren’t quite as bright… I really like the subtle difference.

I liked them so much I decided I’d dye a dark purple (made from the same three primary dyes) and a pale colorwash version with more turquoise showing on the edge. There’s a quilt in this… I don’t know what or when, but it’s there…..

OH MY… they’re even BETTER ironed and stacked….and please ignore the stacking oops on that top stack….the dark one is obviously out of order!

Stacked and sorted, dark end of the piles showing….

Stacked and sorted, light side of the piles showing (the greens and browns are in the center of the piles).

Here’s what the piles look like before they are stacked:

Aren’t those colors heavenly…. now, where to find the money and time to buy 350+ yards of fabric, dye, auxiliaries and dye a yard of each…the make quilts!

If you want to learn how to dye like this, please don’t ask me, go to the source: Carol Soderlund. She’s a whiz a teaching and a whiz at dyeing…. a great combination! She is so good that folks literally travel from around the world to take classes from her… no one else teaches how to get consistent reproducible results like she does! In my two classes, I’ve had classmates from across the US, Australia, France, The Netherlands and France… the word has obviously spread!

Hi all…. it has been a crazy week. My mom, who is 89, is not doing so well, so I’ve been trying to help her and care for her long distance (I’m in Maine and she’s in California). That means I may not be able to post as often for the next month or two, so if I appear to vanish, I’m OK…just swamped with life. It looks like everything is going to work out and that she will be able to move to Maine in a month or so. Keep your fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I have some glorious color to share with you! In the pursuit of perfect color for my art quilts, I’m engaged in a color-swatch-swap (try saying that three times fast! pphhhttt!) with Carol Soderlund and some fellow students. The 8 students were in Carol’s totally awesome dyeing workshops (I’ve blogged about them in the past) either this past October or in August 2007. We are in Australia, The Netherlands, Denmark, and across the US, and are each dyeing a different color family. I chose to use a warm yellow, a red  and a blue, and I may have one of the best color families known to procion MX dyers! The photo above is of the first round of dyeing . Here is the yellow after it got out of the dye buckets, washer and dryer:

Then, you add red:

Then turquoise:

Overall the values (light to darkness) are light… the “black” is really a deep eggplant… the colors of the fabrics in the dyebath was awesome. If I take the darker range and go deeper by having more dye powder per ounce of fabric, I can get some really intense blues…. the colors remind me of tropical fruits (citrus, papaya, mango), flowers (hibiscus and fuchsia and orchids), foliage (lush moist as well as arid climate plants) and the sea… from a stormy day to deep Caribbean ultramarine to those glorious aquas in the shallows….

I’ll add more pictures once everything is ironed and sorted by color range….. WOOOT!

Aljo Dyes in NYC has the elusive (and expensive) Procion MX dye Blauviolett! Usually available only in Europe, this dye has a mystique built up around the color, which I had never seen. The color has been described as an unbelievable blue, not achieved through any other combination. Alas, it also has a reputation of fading hideously quickly. When I ordered it, Aljo also advised it has a much shorter shelf-life than the usual two years for procion mx dyes… it should be used in six months or less they said.

However, I got wind of the availability of this dye in the US for the first time in EONS, so I ordered a fairly small quantity (which I shared with some folks I met in Carol Soderlund’s dyeing classes) just to try. Through Paula Burch and Deb Harowitz of Scarlet Zebra, I learned that the dye might fade quickly on cotton, but that it seems to be MUCH more lightfast on silk. Hmmmm… so I not only dyed a fat quarter of cotton, but several different types of silk (I also finally broke out the citric acid crystals to use instead of the soda ash, which can have a negative effect on the hand and sheen or silk). The photo above shows cotton, silk jacquard (which appears not to be pure silk), sandwashed silk (from Dharma), and a silk chiffon, plus some silk rattail cord (also from Dharma). Here’s what they look like pinned to my design wall–

top row L to R: Sandwashed silk, mercerized cotton,

bottom row L to R: silk (and something) jacquard, silk dupioni, silk rattail cord, silk chiffon:

ALL fabrics were dyed with the same concentration of dye stock–all the silks were batched in the same container which you can see — the round tub on the bottom right! As you can see clearly, the chiffon and the silk portion of the jacquard “took” the dye very deeply, the dupioni and sandwashed silk (heavenly on the hands!) is less intense, and the cotton is lightest of all.

Now that the holidays are behind us, I am planning to cut two swatches of the cotton and the silks. One set of swatches will go inside an envelope and be tucked away inside a drawer or inside a book–thoroughly protected from exposure to any light. The other set of swatches I’ll tape to the inside of my window. Then, if I can actually manage to do this, every month (hopefully regularly, like on the first) I’ll take side-by-side photos to document fading due to light exposure.

Here’s a close-up of the cotton…sigh. Sad to think that in three months this will probably be a dingy purplish pale gray…….

If the silk remains light fast, I’ll buy up some silk and use up the rest of the dye… stay tuned!