Dye, Dying, Dyed...

A couple of weeks ago, I, along with a bunch of my fellow Vallejo Piecemakers, had a fabulous fabric dying experience with Marjan Kluepfel.


We spent a lovely day outside at the Solano County Fairgrounds, under the trees, in front of McCormack Hall, experimenting with all kinds of dying techniques and letting the creativity run amok.



Jan fixed her famous Taco Salad for 100 (or is it 1,000???), and we stuff-faced midway through the day, and then got back to work.


We did a six-stage "gradation" project using two colors of our choice - I picked magenta and turquoise. First, put a couple of cups of the soda ash concoction in each of six separate baggies, then add varying combinations of the two dyes, add fabric, let it sit in the sun for a couple of hours...


Rinse it out, throw it in the washer and dryer, iron, and, Voila! Look what you get...


Soak another piece of fabric in the soda ash solution, spread it out on a piece of plastic on top of a table and, using 2, 3, or however many squirt or spray bottles of different colors, create your design on the fabric, use a paint sponge to spread the color around, then roll the fabric up in the plastic and let it sit for 3 hours, rinse/wash/dry/iron, and get something like this:


Do the soda ash treatment with another piece of fabric, wrap it around a 15" long tube of 4" pipe, scrunch it tightly towards the center, secure with rubber bands, squirt two or more colors alternately around the circumference of the tubed fabric, wrap in plastic, let sit, rinse/wash/ etc...


More soda ash mix on another piece, stuff into a generous plastic bag and squirt the dye directly from the squirt bottle into the baggie, moosh it around a little, then do the finishing routine again...


I also did a bleach resist procedure, but, alas, I didn't use a strong enough bleach solution, so it didn't come out well. Dang! It would have been so cool! Oh, well, that's one for the future, when I get my dyeing studio set up in the garage.

Speaking of the dyeing studio, I've talked about it long enough, so I've quit talking and gotten to work getting crap out of the garage to make room for it. I got rid of the old organ the other day... sent it off to Mike Kendall, an incredible Benicia artist, who will, hopefully turn it into a sculpture of mind-blowing proportions!