Most of what I did looked like this
and this
and this
as I cut up lots of cotton and linen fabrics, soaked all in soda ash and water ready to put into the Procion dyes
Now, Procion is a fibre-reactive dye, and works on cotton, linen, silk, ramie, hemp, rayon. All Plant fibres (yes, I know, silk, but silk is just mysterious and magical, so there... ) Acid dyes, work with Animal fibres, wool, silk, (yes, again!) etc...
What I do is Low Water Immersion Dyeing - I mix up fairly strong dyes with hot water, starting with my three basic colours. Lemon Yellow, Cerise Red, and a good clean blue. From these (and Turquoise, which is hard to make for some reason and makes fabulous purples) I can make almost any colour. Black is almost impossible in Procion, so, I don't...
Then I remix into the squeezy bottles, and put the soaked and wrung-out cloths into pots. I use buckets, ice-cream tubs, big margarine tubs. Big pieces get dyed in washing-up bowls.
The dyes are dribbled and squished into the fabrics. Oh, and each tub today had a skein of thread on top, so double-dyeing.. Rubber gloves are imperative...
Big IKEA jugs with tops, one big tablespoonfull of dye per jug
Dyes ready to use
Six hours later, no more pots..
It's possible to be really quite precise with the colours
All waits overnight, then tomorrow is wet. Rinse, rinse, wash, hang.
