Back to Dyeing

Last week I was hand dyeing. I've been dyeing fabric for years and probably all of my quilts have my own fabric in them somewhere. Some of my quilts are all hand dyes.

Birds of Paradise, 2005

The Trip Around the World series had lots of rounds of hand dyed squares. The occasional gaps in the colour made me think of them as little bits of sunshine coming through the clouds. They were an intrinsic part in making all of these quilts alive and interesting.

I began dyeing with Procion MX dyes many years ago. I was then living in Ireland and this meant ordering them from the UK. Then Dylon came along with their Pure Colour range. They were a godsend: procion based dyes which I could buy in Cork one jar at a time as they ran out. Perfect until the product was discontinued.

I've kept going since then on my leftovers and everybody else's but finally the fix ran out. So I took a deep breath, didn't look at the total, and ordered a whole new batch of dyes and soda ash from Kemtex.( www.kemtex.co.uk an excellent and really helpful company)

I have hundreds of dyeing notes but it's taken me all week to get back into soda ash and urea solutions. I'm hoping all my colour recipes will be the same, and if they aren't well I'll just have a new range of colours.

I spent the initial years merrily squirting syringes of dye into layers of fabrics in jars but eventually I think you feel the need to be more scientific/professional/organised(?). So now I have colour charts and can reproduce colours or dye exactly the shade or tone which I need. Purples, oranges and browns are my favourites. Blues are still a disaster and that beautiful, clear, bright red remains illusive.

I've learnt to re-dye. Think of painting a wall, the first coat of paint dries a bit wishy-washy but the second one is much deeper. It's the same with dyeing; dye a second time and you'll be thrilled with the results.

Fabrics dyed once, on the right, and fabrics dyed twice, on the left.

Also in the box is a jar of synthetic indigo. Indigo – even the name is evocative. I've been dying to try it for years. I have an idea, possibly irrational, that living in a hot climate should produce better results. I haven't opened the jar yet as I'm a bit afraid of letting the genie out of the bottle, I don't think I'll ever stop once I start, but I have done lots of research on the internet. This all led me to thinking about dyeing with natural indigo. One web page led to another and my first seedlings of Japanese Indigo and Woad have just come up. But that's a subject for another post.

The first tiny seeds.