New Fabric
I spent the weekend dyeing fabric with my very talented friend Julie, the head designer at Icelandic Design. I enjoyed seeing her amazing beaded jewelry and quilts.
I love dyeing - what a big goopy mess and what wonderful colors. I dyed 90 yards of fabric in a day and a half.
Rayna ask in her blog about our least favorite art, studio, business related thing. I couldn’t come up with anything to post because I do enjoy all of it.
Until this weekend - I do the dyeing in my basement but have to carry all the bins of fabric and dye upstairs to my washer. Ugh - it is heavy - and I spill it on the carpet and it’s overall a very unpleasant task. I’d love to get a second washer/dryer in the basement dedicated to dyeing so I could this task.
I dye in 1 yard pieces - Kaufman pimatex PFD. The blacks are overdyed black pimatex. I dye them with blue, green, purple, fushia, red, etc to have a variety of blacks to work with. Occasionally I will dye white fabric to black because I love the texture but it’s a trick to get the black to really work - takes a bunch of dye and salt. So it is easier to just over dye black.
I was aiming for mostly warm colors, hence the lack of blues and purples. Although my favorite fabric is a very dusty gray purple. Yummy.
Posted by in: Making Abstract Contemporary Textile Art
Susan said,
August 30, 2005 @ 7:31 am
Ah… *finally* someone else who likes those grey/purple hazy sorts of shades. My mother calls them my ‘mud colors’, as if she’s ever seen purple mud!
Karoda said,
August 30, 2005 @ 5:08 pm
I cannot imagine doing that much fabric and having it neatly pressed in a day and a half…most impressive!
Valeri said,
September 13, 2005 @ 3:04 pm
Lovely colours and it’s interesting to read about how you get your blacks. I find black one of the hardest colours to get true!