A day to dye for

Did lots of dyeing today. Or maybe not lots, technically, but I did what I needed to do and also some stuff just for fun. Alex "helped" by watching me and kindly providing the chance for me to say "don't touch that, sweetie" and "be careful, you don't want to knock that over" every 42 seconds. Wasn't that nice? He also parfait dyed (sort of) a hat, but it wasn't dry enough to take a photo of, so more of that tomorrow.


Anyway, the pieces above are some stuff I did just for fun - a rubber band shibori in chocolate brown, hot pink and lapis, and a corresponding piece done parfait style. I am thinking I might make a bag from these. We'll see.


Below is my work on two CCRR's (complex cloth round robin) with my dyeing group - this is just with the dyeing group, not the surface embellishment group, so we aren't doing anything quite as weird with these. :) Seriously, what I mean is, the work will be dyeing & painting & discharging rather than other sorts of embellishment, though what you do within those categories is not restricted much. Here's what I did.

With Karen's piece, which started off life as a kind of rose colour, I stamped it with cold batik wax resist and overdyed it in lapis - it's a little darker than I intended - not that I think it doesn't look nice - indeed, I'm very happy with it - but as two more people have to work on it after me, I was hoping it would be a little lighter. Still, there's always discharge.


And Judi's piece, which you can see the original colour of nicely in this photo, I stamped with thickened chocolate brown dye using flower stamps and kokopellis. If I were finishing the piece myself I would have done more to it, but again, it needs to go on to two others before it gets home to Judi, so I didn't want it too busy.



The final thing I dyed (though technically, I did these pieces first) was the fabric for the complex colour swap with my dye group - use three dyes to make a new one - because this is a summer swap, we decided it should be red or orange. I used turkey red, scarlet and burnt orange (left to right; all from ProChem) to make the new colour (shown below the other three). The difference in person is slightly greater, but in all, I'm very happy, as it came out a lot like I wanted it to. Given the dyes I used, I should probably call the new colour "Burnt Turkey" but it's too pretty for that...


And while I was waiting for all those dyes to batch, I did another block for my birthday block swap - this block isn't due until August, so I'm well ahead of the game this time - you may recognise it as being very similar to the purple block I did a little while back. But I think it came out nicely - she wanted red & white, like in a peppermint stick, and I think it's worked well.