A Little Dyeing, A Little #INKtober

I knew I was avoiding that dye session for my friend for a good reason. Making anything to the specs of someone else has always put undue stress on me to the point I eventually decided commission work was not for me. Dyeing should be different, especially as there is no payment for my services involved but still, it's just my personality that it is important to me to produce accurately what is asked of me. I had two swatches to work from, only planned on doing a half yard each of two dye powder colors so decided to try a different method from my usual freezer bag method. I had a book with a method that is supposed to work well for quick, small piece dyeing and thought this would be a great way to try it out. Fabric is soaked in soda ash solution first, the fabric is swished through dye solution and set to batch. I used these Oxi Clean tubs to hold the fabric. I know they look the same but one is using Basic Blue dye, the other Bright Blue - both Pro Chem dyes. No setting up gradations, just dyeing up the darkest value of each.

Swatches against results using Dyeing To Quilt book

To my surprise, both half yards came out very light, with a few dark places. I honestly don't know why that would have happened. One did look like it could be a match with one of the swatches. The other swatch leans towards having a little purplishness to it and it was difficult to tell if the other half yard would be a match if it were darker.

Basic Blue on bottom close match to rectangular swatch. Bright Blue on top no match to triangle swatch

I decided to just dye them again, same dye solution, same amount, but using my tried and true method of putting the soda ash solution in bags, adding the dye solution and then the fabric. They came out darker and I decided that the Basic Blue one was close enough to a swatch to call it a match, but the Bright Blue was no where close.

Back to square one, I looked at my inventory list of dye powders with my friend's dyes listed at the bottom and realized that she had only two blue dyes in what she'd passed on to me. Perhaps the Navy was used to get the color of the purplish blue swatch. With nothing to lose, I quickly dyed up a half yard with that, but again, it wasn't even close. Now I'm looking at other blue dye powders in my collection and may try dyeing up quarter yards of several of them to see if I can do better. Very frustrating and why I really don't like the idea of trying to dye to match anymore. So much effort goes into what can be disappointing results.

Speaking of disappointing results, I've been wanting to try dyeing a unappealing yellow tablecloth that was used at my grandparents' Golden Wedding Anniversary. I've seen pictures of the table it was on, topped with a lace tablecloth that I also have. That yellow just isn't appealing but there's a really pretty design running around the border - I believe this would be called damask. Wasn't sure of the fiber content, but being the 1950's when this was used, I was pretty sure it would be linen or cotton. I never cleaned up after my big dyeing session last fall, loath to throw out unused dye solution but never gaining the umph to keep dyeing until it was gone. I had visions of pouring it directly onto the tablecloth and letting the different colors mix and seep and cover up all that yellow. Well, here I was a year later needing to clear the dye cart for this new dye project so soaked the tablecloth along with the cotton half yards and draped it into two bins set side by side. I meant to take a picture of that but flipped one side into the other bin before I remembered. You can already see the dye did not move like I thought it would 

They say dye solution is only good for a week at best, if stored in a cool place. Yes, results may not be as good or strong the older the solution gets, and this solution had weathered a very hot garage all summer. Still, what did I have to lose? Most of the dyes were in the purple range, maybe a blue in there and one that must have been a brown. What an ugly mess if you look at the piece as a whole. But I never meant for it to be kept whole, but to be cut up taking advantage of various places and colors. Still, I really did think the dyes would migrate more. And while the purples and blues came out quite light, look at the brown!

Here's a great example of how the dye does bring out the pattern in the cloth. It needs more dyeing but for now, I've folded it up and put it away. It might have worked better if I'd cut the tablecloth into smaller pieces but I didn't want to fool with that right now. This might be a good candidate for some snow dyeing this winter.

I have made some progress on my #INKtober sketches. I'm running up against an old problem with sizing as I sketch. I can't seem to sketch small and some of the bridges end up getting cut short. Still, lots of fun researching pics on line and then trying my hand at sketching them with a minimum of detail - something that is also difficult for me to do. I'm a detail person at heart! 

These are for Sherrie who reminded me to sketch the Tacoma Narrows Bridge near where we both lived at one time. The original bridge had some engineering faults that caused it to sway during high winds, earning it the name of Galloping Gertie. It eventually came down in spectacular way, twisting and turning as you see here until it tore itself apart. A new bridge served well into the years after I left the area in the nineties, but growth demanded more lanes to handle increased traffic. The solution was just to build a second bridge next to it, which I found quite intimidating the first time over it during a visit.

I do find drawing arcs a challenge. They tend to do well on the way up from the left but tend to drift down out of proportion as I finish them. Better on the Manito Park bridge but it really is longer. Either the initial arc should have been longer or the spacing of the other arcs closer together. I did a lot better on the floating leaf bridge.

So I was happy to get back to bridges with straight lines. Still struggled with sizing so the whole top and bottom bridge fit on the page. Still quite a few days of practice yet to solve that.