I Dyed on Saturday

... and lived to tell the tale :o). Oh dear, such weak jokes, they come around every time anyone mentions fabric dyeing, but they're impossible to resist LOL! We had a great day with Jacqui Calladine, we started by simply painting dye on wet fabric, then we graduated to dying small pieces of fabric in jam jars, gradually adding dye and fabric as we went along. I say small, it's surprising how much fabric you can jam into a jar (another very weak pun, sorry!), I managed to get 1/2m into one. My favourite piece from this exercise is the mottled linen.



After lunch we put various tied and stitched pieces into a dye bath, so they had a more uniform colour, but with lighter spots where the various resists were applied. My favourite technique was the jam jar dying, I really like the effects that gave, using different colours and letting them blend around the crumpled fabric. We left the dyed fabric in the jars for about an hour before pouring out excess dye and adding a soda solution to fix it, but if you were doing this at home you'd probably leave it overnight. When I got home I put all the fabrics in the washing machine, they came out quite a bit lighter, but hopefully that means they won't run at a future date.

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