Grubby hands again!

A wonderful workshop at the Embroiderers Guild with Art Van Go showing us how to use discharge paste. It was a very hot day so we all struggled a bit, but at least we could get our fabric dry quickly! viv showed us how to use the paste on black discharge cotton and also on cotton dyed withrocion dyes. Once the colour was taken out, we then worked on putting colour back in with more dye and fabric paint.

It was great fun and very inspiring and my pieces were OK if nothing special. If I was using this technique for a project, I would need to do some detailed planning. This wasn't possible on the day, so the results were a bit hit and miss.

So I've been busy dyeing some more fabric as my stash of hand dyes was getting a bit depleted. Quite why I bought some mixed dye colours I can't now remember. As Procion dyes are easy to mix and you can get just about every colour you need from just 6 colours it is a bit of a waste, but I've decided to use them anyway and see what happens.

Here is my gradation using black currant.

I'm not totally happy with the way the colour has taken. The darkest is much bluer than any of the others and looks like a completely different hue. Also when rinsing, some of the blue component must still have been active as there are some blue spots on the lighter fabric which only appeared after washing.

Judging by the look of the dyed fabric, some of it seems to be poly cotton. Not sure how that happened, but I did take the fabric pieces out of the scrap bag so it's possible there was some in there. It just shows that procion dyes will work on poly cotton which might be useful to know!

 Yesterday was spent getting lots more fabric dyed. I'm using Jo Lovelock's method for dyeing a family of tones using two colours. I've chosen Lemon yellow for the first colour and have dyed 12 pieces of fabric. Four each of dark, medium and light and these are flapping away on the washing line. Even though there was a huge difference in the quantities of dye used, the colours are pretty similar! Never mind it's all good experience! The second colour is slate blue and this is also dark,medium and light so at the end there is a wide range of values in a mix of hues.

There was very little difference between the medium and light yellow and so the range of colours is a bit more limited than I wanted, but still there is enough here for me to work on a series of journal quilts.

So now for the not so successful. I decide to follow the recipes for complex colours in Helen Deighans book mixing magenta, turquoise and yellow in various combinations. Before rinsing the colours looked really good, but after washing it seemed that the magenta component had completely disappeared leaving some truly wishy washy colours. I don't know what went wrong so have tried a test piece just using magenta which seems to have worked.

One question I cannot find an answer to is, why do I continue to dye my skin such lovely colours even though I wear rubber gloves! The dye seems to get everywhere so today I have blue and yellow patches on my arms and magenta fingers!

I'm not sure what to do with the wishy washy fabric but will wait and see. Lots to be getting on with in the garden because the peas need picking, podding and freezing. Broad beans are beginning and the calabrese is hearing up!