Thursday, April 10, 2008

Low Water Immersion Dyeing


I took a workshop on Saturday with Sharon Weltner on Low Water Immersion Dyeing. It was great! I discovered that I didn't take enough fabric, but Sharon was kind enough to let me buy some. The PDF fabric that I used had brought had the best result. We used three different techniques. The first was dyeing in a plastic bag. This was pretty easy - water the fabric, measure the dye and add it to the fabric, then add pot ash as a dye activator. We let the sample sit for one hour and then rinsed (two colds and one hot) for our result. Final rinse bath included Synthrapol. We used ProChem's MX dyes.

The second technique used three pieces of fabric to make gradations. Again using the same materials, we put the first in the bucket, added dye and pot ash. Added the second fabric, and more dye and pot ash and repeated this one more time. Each layer used a different amount of dye. Mine wasn't truly a gradation since I used both green and yellow, but I liked the result.

The third technique was similar to the second, except it was called Parfait Dyeing. This time you use a light color, second layer is a medium different color and lastly a dark different color. The three dyes mix somewhat together, but not completely. I chose a warm palette of brown, coral and yellow. I ended up with brownish red, coral, brown and gold and orange gold fabric.

Sharon suggested that we take notes about the formula, but since we didn't have the same dye base at home, this would be hard to duplicate. In any event we learned a lot and I would like to do this again. The PDF fabric yielded the best results since the white of the fabric, where where the dye wasn't activated by the pot ash remained sort of white and faded to color where the activator worked. It reminded me of tie-dyed fabric, but without the ties.

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