Sunday, January 25, 2009

Fabric to Dye for

In the latest issue of Quilting Arts magazine there is an article with really good directions for dyeing fabric with Rit dye. All of the directions I have seen before have been very sketchy. I tried to tie dye a piece of muslin in my washing machine awhile back and the dye didn't take at all! ARghhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... so when I saw this article I got out my packages of dye and tried it again, on the stove this time. As a teenager in the 70's I tie dyed MANY t-shirts on the stove in my mother's ceramic pan, but that was so long ago I didn't remember how to do it. I used the leftover teal dye from the first attempt and this is what I got:
cheesecloth

unbleached muslin

I LOVE the mottled look of both pieces. The package of dye only makes so much dye and I used small pieces to test the method. Now that I know it works just like I had envisioned, I need to buy more muslin and double or triple the batch in a bigger pot!!
Working on a black and white swap has stymied me until I remembered the cut out doodle flowers that are in Alma Stoller's SoulCraft Zine. I doodled on the pages of an Alice in Wonderland book. These are the ones that are ready to cut out and use somehow in the swap:

2 comments:

Jane Eileen said...

Bring those to the next PLAY date. I have an idea. It involves thread. Oh, big surprise!

Penney said...

Thread? No way! Maybe by then I will have some more pieces done....