New Hand-Dyed Fabrics and Shirts

Love these three day weekends.  I was very productive on Saturday, dyeing up a storm.  Then Sunday started feeling like I was coming down with a cold, so have been taking it easy, drinking lots of sinus and sore throat teas, as I grade stacks of papers for school.

Here are the results from Saturday's dyeing.

This was a very low-water immersion piece using multiple colors of dye, spread out in a large tub, with very little water, left to cure for 24 hours.

The one above and below are over-dyed itajime fabrics that I had originally created at least a year ago.  The one below had lots of circles with centers, created using CDs and metal washers, which I was calling my 'boob' fabric.  I like it much better now that the circles aren't so obvious. 

Below are some shirts I did using Arash Shibori techniques.  These will be on sale at the Trash to Treasures event at the March meeting of the Almond Country Guild.  I'm hoping to have more of a range of sizes this year than last year.

New arashi shibori and really low immersion dyed fabrics

Here are a couple of new fabrics.  I really like the cotton velveteen pictured below.  It takes the dye so beautifully in that the colors look very vibrant. For this one, I used fabric that had been previously soaked in soda ash and allowed to dry.  I carefully arranged it, scrunching up here and there in a container and then applied the dye using squeeze bottles. Unlike low immersion dyeing I do not add very much liquid, either in the form of  plain water or soda ash water. following the dyes.  I wasn't sure how potent my dyes would be since, some of them I've had since last September, but you can see they are still very good.  I keep my liquid concentrates in a small, dorm size fridge in our barn.

The fabric below was also dry, pre-soaked in soda ash.  I wrapped it around a four inch piece of PVC pipe and squirted dyes onto it. I think this one is going to need further surface design,

perhaps some discharging here and there.

Designing a Quilt with Parfait Dyed Fabrics

Today, I was working with some fabrics I made a couple of years ago by using the parfait dyeing method.  I folded, scrunched and squished three- half yard pieces of fabric into a gallon size pitcher.  In between each fabric, I poured some highly concentrated liquid procion dyes and topped it all off with some soda ash.  The process is similar to what is described in Ann Johnston's great book, Color by Accident, which has some great recipes for creating beautiful low-water immersion dyed fabrics.   These fabrics though, have more folds due to how tightly they fit into the pitcher, which in turn creates some wonderful  stained-glass like designs, at least that's what I got in this batch.  Here's a couple photos of the fabrics and closeups.

Below is my sketch idea for using these fabrics.  I like taking photos of my fabrics and playing around with cutting them up, rather than cutting up the fabric.