Monday 6 June 2011

Dyeing fabric




Although I have been quiet on the blog front, I have been very busy working.  My new studio is up and running and is a godsend.  Just as well for the amount of time I have been spending in it.  I have been dyeing fabric to make my principal pieces for my Festival of Quilts gallery.  I had five buckets set up in my studio and used four different colours of procion mixed together.  I know that many people want to dye precisely, but I love the random effect, so the buckets had too much fabric in and gave a great patchy effect.  I didn't have any soda ash, but our fabulous local ironmongers, McFarlanes, which has everything, had washing soda.  I had help from two of my monsters with stirring the fabric in the buckets.

I started rinsing it out my hand, but eventually just bunged it straight in the washing machine to rinse out any excess dye.  I brought a drying rack into the studio as it was raining (it rained every single day in May - we're feeling rather soggy) and got it all dried.


Of course, the downside of doing all this dyeing is all the ironing it creates.  This was the bucket of some of the fabric waiting to be pressed.


The fabric is all pressed now and I'm cutting it up to make my figures.  Having used scraps for so long, it feels rather strange to be cutting into large pieces of fabric, but I don't have enough scraps to make a 2m high person.




1 comment:

Maggi said...

Your 2m high person sounds intriguing. I shall visit with interest in August.

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