This week I'm preparing for a ten-day trip to Germany by laying out a circle quilt which I'll be able to hand-sew while traveling.
As usual, I thought I had all the fabrics I needed for this black, blue and brown quilt in my fabric stash, but there just wasn't enough variety of color or movement. To amend the situation I decided to overdye some fabrics that were the wrong color but had the qualities I needed.
First, I chose the fabrics...
I wanted to be able to monitor the color changes following dyeing, so I recycled a used Tyvec bag (this one was a post office Priority mail bag) by cutting it into small pieces. The Tyvec will not dye, can be written on, and will not fall apart in the washing machine following the dye process (learned this trick in a Colleen Wise workshop). I numbered each piece so that I could match the "before and after" fabrics. Also, the fabrics were placed in two piles: one for deep blue dye and one for black dye.
Here are some of the results...
Now I have plenty of fabric choices for this quilt and will start cutting today!
2 comments:
I like this a lot. I'm often painting over or discharging fabric to get more selections also. What type of dye did you use?
Julie, I use Procion MX dyes and the low-water immersion process, which is relatively easy to do. Ann Johnston's book Color by Accident gives directions. You'd love her other book, Color by Design which teaches us to "paint" with dye. I'm going to try that soon. I'll see you on Tuesday!
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