Thursday, June 17, 2010

Dye-ing, not dying.

My oldest daughter has plans for a black and jewel tone quilt but couldn't find exactly what she was looking for in my stash, so we decided to dye some bleached muslin (which I buy by the bolt). I don't have a picture of that yet, but I figured while she was dying things (girls' camp shirt needed some tie-dying too), I would throw in some different fabrics just to see how they'd turn out. Oh, yeah, and some diapers for burp cloths. I love those.
I have these in a before and after setup. You can see that in most there is not much difference between the before and after. I think that was due in part to the fact that the dye was running out. I should have gotten the big bottle instead of the little packet. Live and learn.
That top one looks pink in this pic, but in real life it's a decent lavender. Probably the second best result.

Overall I think I mostly just got a muddied look. Again, I think that was in part due to not enough dye. I was just throwing things in at the end to see what would happen. Some of them I WILL use. I have been thinking of a purple, black, and white quilt. Some of these just don't qualify as purple. I just used RIT dye. I saw that iDye stuff at Joann's the last time I was there, so I might try that one of these times, see if I get better results. So, overall, not a failure, because I learned something, but certainly not quite what I was going for. I'll probably try more as we dye my daughter's other fabrics. The whites obviously take it the best. We'll see. Have you ever tried dying or altering the color in your fabric?

3 comments:

Marsha said...

WOW. looks like lots of fun! I do like how the bleached muslin turned out.

Des said...

wow 2!! me and marsha are basically thinking alike.

very clever.

Rebekah said...

So cool! I definitely need to try dying some fabric soon.