Today, my friend Wendy and I taught a friend, Kris, a basic gradation dyeing class. Kris won't be able to attend our class scheduled for June 26, so we decided to make her our 'guinnea pig' to test our class lesson plan. We started out about 9am or so, went through 4 exercises, and had everything done, washed and dried by about 1:30... not bad! Kris dyed 5 yards of fabric. First 1/2 yard was a solid fuchsia, the next 3 1/2 yard pieces were done in a 3 layer parfait using cerulean blue; next came a 5 piece crossover gradation from yellow to blue with greens in the middle. Last exercise was to use up leftover dyes, and we ended up doing a double accordion fold which we banded, then Kris applied first the yellow, then overdyed with some blue. She was thrilled with how the fabrics looked, and went home a happy dyer!
I got these shots of them while Kris was pasting up one of the dyes:
Wendy is on the left, Kris is on the right. We had beautiful weather all day except for occasional gusts of wind, but enjoyed being outside for a change! Silly me... I totally forgot to get pictures of the dyed fabric! I'll do better next month when we have the larger class, promise!
2 comments:
Hi Judy, I've been busy dyeing myself these past few days. How do you manage to have it all washed and dried in only a few hours' time? I always though you had to leave the fabric in the dye for at least 12 hours. I use Procion MX dyes. Maybe you use something else? Would love to hear from you.
Laura
Hi, Laura. Good question! My rule of thumb for direct application dyeing is minimum 8 hours. However, the dyeing method we used for gradation dyeing was low water immersion, which does not require long to batch. Plus, we were outside, and had the baggies batching in the direct sun, which heats them up nicely and accellerates the batch process. We were using procion mx dyes. Hope this helps!
Judy
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