Showing posts with label Procion MX dyes. Show all posts

Monday, July 27, 2020

Mark-making & Dyeing perle cotton

July is almost finished! For a while it looked like it would never end....and now it's almost done! The heat and humidity has left me estivating - not going out if I can help it, so of course, that means working with fabrics, with a little paint and dye on the side to spice things up! 😊

Mark-making with Colour Vie

Almost three years ago, Out of the Box Fibre Artists Group had Gunnel Hag as their speaker. She has developed a pigment system, Colour Vie that is great to paint and screen printing. I tried it out when my artist friend, Lyne, came to visit (see Related links below). I had liked playing with them but haven't touched them since, Paint makes me nervous....

As you may know, I've been following TextileArtist.org's Stitch Club 2020 and this week's presenter was Gregory T. Wilkins. Our assignment was to make marks with paint and then add stitches to it. In two different sessions, I took out my Colour Vie pigments and made marks using all kinds of things like forks, a silk flower, stamps and stencils. I made 8 blocks on one piece of cotton fabric that was divided using green painter's tape. Between sessions, I ironed on a few pieces of freezer paper to cover some of the things I liked and I also added painter's tape to keep some spots blank.

I'm going to use Panel 4 for my workshop piece.

Here are the finished panels with the tape removed. I liked panel 4 the best for doing my project but there are various parts of each panel that I like - so one day I just might cut them up and put them back together - cause that's what quilters do!

Eight panels with marks

I have started stitching on Panel 4.

Running stitch and French knots
using #12 perle cotton

Running stitch and satin stitches
The centre is #8 perle cotton

The red/raspberry perle cotton that I used is the thread that I dyed a few days ago.😊

Lots of possibilities for embroidering some of the marks!

Dyeing perle cotton

My artist friend, Elaine Quehl, has taught courses in fabric and thread dyeing. To be honest, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to dye thread....well it turns out that she mostly dyed perle cotton. Since she had some extra from her class, I bought some white #8 and #12 perle cotton and did a little bit of experimenting. Thanks Elaine for your support - I should have taken your class😊

I also tend to get nervous about fabric dyeing - so to keep it low stress, I try to work in small batches. I made 2 skeins each of white #8 and #12 perle cotton. I very carefully placed them in the soda ash and water solution. Thread can very easily tangle, so they need to be handled with lots of care!

I placed the skeins in a wash basin and covered three of them with the dark raspberry dye. I then added water to the dye and used that for the last skein of thread.

Skeins soaking to stop the dye
from bleeding

Drying in the hallway -
it was too cold in the basement!

Helping me keep the thread from tangling
while I transfer it to spools

Several spools of #8 and #12 perle cotton

Since I was in the basement dyeing perle cotton, I thought that I might as well dye a little bit of fabric. I dyed some cheese cloth and a strip of linen using the left-over raspberry dye. I also cut up a piece from my mother's use-to-be-white cotton sheet to see if I could do anything with it. The sheet is in great shape, just not white anymore. For this experiment, I dyed a piece of sheet using some left-over dye from a snow dyeing class that Pat, another artist taught. The dye combined many left-over colours and was a few months old, but I figured that I had nothing to loose. I folded one end of the fabric and tied it off, while I scrunched up the other end of the fabric and also tied it.

Here are the results. You saw the cheesecloth drying in the image above.

The scrunched up and tied end of the fabric

The other end of the fabric - folded and tied

A piece of now light pink linen

What I learned

I love the gray coloured fabric. What a wonderful surprise! I should dye more fabric before the dye changes.
The light pink linen was only left in the dye bath for about 10 hours, while the thread was in there for over a day, so that might account for the difference. However, the cheesecloth was only in the dye bath for 10 hours also. I think that the perle cotton and the cheesecloth may have absorbed the dye well because it's only a strand and not woven tightly. If you know the answer, please let me know!
The first skein of perle cotton that I placed on a spool went well, for about half. Then I got impatient and it got tangled. The good news is that since I don't want to machine stitch with it, different lengths of thread on a spool is not a bad thing, as long as they are each long enough to embroider with 😊.
I love the dyed perle cotton. It is quite a bit of work but mostly tedious, like making the skeins and then transferring to spools. I have two colours of perle cotton - a raspberry and a pink. You can see these in the images of the embroidered paint-marked fabric.
I also had a great time mark-making on the fabric. I was going to stop at 6 panels but then experimented with some fun texture techniques on the last two panels. As I mentioned, all of the pieces have some lovely parts that will get used some day!

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Playing with dye

I've dyed fabric a few times in the last couple of years. The first time was flat-dyeing, and the second and third times were snow and ice dyeing respectively. This time I did some low-water immersion dyeing. It really isn't that much work and has a lot of potential.

Low-water immersion dyeing

Some lovely folded low-immersion dyed fabric

Setting up my dyeing session in the laundry room

I wish that I could show you pictures of the wonderful mason jars full of colour and fabric, but I left my camera/phone upstairs. I did all of the preparation and dyeing in the basement laundry room. The image you see here is from the first time that I mixed dye in the basement - and it looked a lot like this :-)

After removing the clothes hanging above the washer, I covered the washer and dryer with plastic and then fabric. Have you noticed that when you'r prepared for a mess, that it doesn't happen?

This time I used 6 different Procion MX dyes - grass green, turquoise, yellow, raspberry and fuchsia. I didn't mix the dyes together.

I used the book Fast, fun & easy fabric dyeing by Lynn Koolish. I usually buy the e-book versions since they are much less expensive, especially if I have to get them shipped to Canada, but I am really happy that I have the hard copy. It was so much easier to consult the book while dyeing the fabric.

The book is really excellent. The instructions are easy to follow. I especially liked the images that illustrate the different results you can obtain using the different techniques.

I went straight to the Textured dyeing chapter. I used one and two-colour dyeing, placing the scrunched fabrics and the rolled fabrics in the small containers technique.

I used some regular white Kona fabric but also wanted to find out how non-white fabrics would turn out. I dyed a variety of fabrics such as a striped cotton hand-woven towel, a piece of natural linen (from a skirt), a piece from my husband's old cotton khaki pants, some yellow cotton napkins as well as an old hand-woven placemat.

Here are pictures of some of the finished fabrics. Since I didn't take pictures during the process and very few notes, the descriptions are mostly assumptions based on the finished dyed fabric 😊

These were white cotton napkins. The top two were folded using elastics and a couple of clothes pins. I had fuchsia in the bottom of the container and added turquoise on top. The bottom napkins were scrunched in separate containers using only one colour each - fuchsia and turquoise.

Low water-immersion dyeing of white napkins

The three fabrics here were scrunched up in different mason jars. The left one in fuchsia, the right one in raspberry and the bottom one in yellow. The fabric dyed in raspberry is a beautiful piece of natural linen.

Low water-immersion dyeing using only one colour each

These two larger pieces are two halves of the fabric that I placed over the plastic to protect my work space (dryer!) I decided to dye them since I still had dye and was running out of handy fabric. I folded them from the centre using elastics to keep them together and placed them in fuchsia dye. The small splatters of extra colours come from previous dyeing sessions.

Folder fabric from the centre in fuchsia dye

Folded fabric from the centre
in fuchsia dye with a little yellow

Folder fabric from the centre in diluted fuchsia dye

The next fabrics were experiments. This first fabric is a cotton-woven placemat. The left side is a piece of the original placemat while the right one was over-dyed in raspberry. The white warp threads really stand out after the dyeing.

Over-dyeing hand-woven cotton placemats

These were yellow cotton napkins. I had started to embroider a rose on the left on. It was dyed in green while the other one got both green and yellow.

Yellow napkins dyed with green

These two pieces are cotton knit fabric. The top one was dry when I scrunched it into the mason jar while the bottom one was wet and dyed using the green and turquoise.

Cotton knit fabric

There are no pictures of the khaki fabric and the dishcloth since I thought that I would spare you the very ugly results. I'll include my thoughts in the "What I learned" section below.

Snow and Ice Dyeing

When my girlfriend came to visit in early March, we did a little bit of snow dyeing in the garage. She had to leave before seeing the results. So here they are!

Subtle colours from snow dying using dye powders

I had read on the internet that I could put the dye powder in salt and pepper shakers and just shake the dye over the snow.

It turns out that this technique is better used for ice dyeing. When the powdered dye is placed directly on the snow, it becomes diluted and results in pale colours.

Lightly dyed fabric

A few weeks later, I did some ice dyeing using the same technique of placing the dye directly on the ice. I did add a little bit of snow over the ice since I wasn't sure that I had made enough ice. This was done in the laundry room.

Ice topped with snow for dyeing

All set up for ice dyeing

Ice and snow melted - wet dyed fabric

This time the results were much brighter. I love the patterns that the ice makes on the fabric. You'll notice that the results are mostly fuchsia - that's because I was almost out of all of my other colours.

Beautiful design from ice dyeing

Ice dyeing with little bits of colour