Tuesday, July 27, 2010

fabric dyeing

The last week most of my time was taken up with cleaning/reorganising my studio. This was really needed as I could not find the things I needed and I knew I still had. By reading this you can probably guess that this is not my favorite way of spending my time :-). The only art-related things I did was stitching the fused canal houses, but that is not something which looks different than the pictures I showed you of the fused stage. So no new pictures of that.
What I can show you is some icecube dyeing I did this weekend. I had frozen some dye concentrate left over from the poppy petals I dyed. When the concentrate is frozen it is practically impossible to see what color the ice cube is. I soda soaked half a yard of fabric, crunched it into a container and placed 10-12 ice cubes on it. After they had melted the fabric looked like this:
A bit too much white was still there so I decided to overdye it, using turqoise. I mixed a dye concentrate of about 5% diluted this with water and added this to the container in which the freshly soda soaked fabric was crunched. As you can see the white is gone and the colors show some more depth because of this over dyeing.

5 comments:

Lynn Cohen said...

What an awesome piece of fabric and a wonderful lesson thank you very very much!!! Who knew? Not me that's for sure! Ice cubes!!!
Love it.
PS What kind of soda used? As in soda you drink or baking soda?

Art by Rhoda Forbes said...

Great results with the ice cubes will. Love the vibrant colors.

Margeeth said...

Hmmm, eerlijk gezegd vind ik de eerste foto ook al heel mooi, misschien zelfs mooier. Ik ben zelf gestopt met het oververven van stof die er zo uit ziet, vond eigenlijk elke keer dat ik de stof 'verpest' had (stoffen waarvan de helft wit is gebleven verf ik nog wel over).

Anonymous said...

Thank you. Something new to try. I get so many good ideas from your blog.

Gabriel said...

Hee Wil, het is Gabriel the brasilian!!!

How are you, it's been so long since I've heard any news from you... Where do you live now, and what are you doing?

I'm an engineer now, and i work in a Steelmaking Plant 200km from Belo Horizonte. I'd love to hear from you, write to me, please! gbambirra at yahoo.com

All the best,
Gabriel