Dyeing to Dye

I might have uploaded these photos earlier in the week, but my hands and wrists are bothering me big time, so I've put this off until this morning.

Over the past week I low water immersion dyed repeatedly, trying different things each time, working on perfecting my method. The most critical thing I've found, is that you need to batch for 24 hours, or at least overnight. There are countless procedures floating around out there that say you can achieve good results in 2 hours or less, but in my humbling experience, it's just not true. So now that I know this, I've been overdyeing a few pieces in more recent sessions.

The two pieces above are from a parfait session, using rusts, deep orange/red, and browns. The first piece is overdyed muslin, something I originally dyed last weekend that turned out way too pale for my taste. The piece just above is really stunning -- it's 100% silk, handwoven by me from yarn samples I had from my supplier in Bangalore. I had tried rusting it last year but because the fabric is so thick, the rust process didn't work measurably. I decided to throw it into the mix this week and here's what I got! It has "slow cloth" written all over it!

The last two pieces are from the first session that was batched for 21 hours -- and I like these, although I'll change my process somewhat next time so the results suit my taste even more.

So there you have it. Have a good weekend. I'm hoping to start quilting on the couple of pieces I have ready to go. Although I've been in a designing mood all week, so I'll likely carry on blocking out another couple quilts for this month's challenges.