Newly Dyed & Painted Fabric

The piece above, half of an old linen tablecloth, is the best of a bunch of fabric I dyed yesterday by the parfait method -- that is, layering approximate half yards of fabric in a bucket alternately with cups of dye (1 tsp dye powder and about 1 tsp of soda ash per each cup) until you've got about 10 pieces of fabric and 10 cups of dye -- and letting it steep for about 24 hours.

This second piece was in that batch as well, and it's a piece of raw silk. I used a variety of fabrics -- raw silk, old linen, silk gauze, silk habotai, silk crepe de chine, brocade silk, silk chiffon, Kona muslin, and a couple other things I can't remember -- and I used a variety of dyes in the warm green, rust and purple families. Thought it would all turn out better than it did, so I'll likely overdye the pieces I don't care for. You never know what you're going to get with this method.

This dye technique works best with fabrics that have body -- cottons, linen, the raw silk -- but not as well with the very fine fabrics that don't hold creases and folds.

This last image was an interesting experiment I've wanted to try for quite some time. Both pieces were shiboried on a pole and painted with Setacolor transparent paint. The slightly tan piece at lower left had been fully painted with brown and black paint, wrapped on a pole while wet, scrunched down, and left out in the sun to dry. The outside folds that were exposed to the sun are the dark lines you see. The other sample was wrapped on a pole as an undyed piece of fabric, scrunched, then painted with black Setacolor. The lighter areas were not exposed to sunlight plus didn't have any paint on them...although they turned slightly blue/gray as some paint bled through.

I kind of prefer the way the first piece turned out better than the second, but it seems like a waste of a lot of paint when most of it isn't exposed to light and therefore doesn't develop. Anyhow, I'm not sure that I would do this again, but it was on my mind to try and I'm glad I did!