Can you tell I love these fabrics? These are the dyed fabrics that Sarah and I made while we were in Tennessee. Sarah had the fabric (Kona PFD) delivered to her Mom's place- along with a couple more dyes. The dye is called fiber reactive dye and comes in a powder form. (She got everything from Dharma Trading Company) So you wash your fabric in some kind of ash stuff- real technical there- and then you're ready to go. Sarah tore the fabric into 1/2 yard pieces, so we each got a fat quarter of everything when we were done. We have a real rainbow of colors, by mixing the dyes and diluting them to make different tones.
While the dye is called fiber reactive, you'll notice that Sarah and I are wearing plastic gloves, because the dye is also skin reactive. That didn't keep Sarah from dying her feet a lovely shade of blue- and my forearms looked like I had been wrestling with a bear- did I mention what a messy cooker I am?- same goes for dyeing, I guess. I was splashing stuff everywhere. That's the rag in the upper right hand corner- our mop up. But didn't my messy cooking make a lovely color?
After dyeing each individual piece of fabric, we put them in plastic containers and set them in the sun to incubate. 30 colors in all. Sarah- look what is in that upper left-hand corner of this picture. Can you believe that? Caught that truck red-handed. (You see, after all of our dyeing, we had worked up an appetite. So we headed into town for lunch. Figuring that if we ate at Sonic, no one would see our splattered clothes. As we are driving down her folks' road, there was this jumbled wad of aluminum tubing in the middle of the road. It was over a foot high and what looked to be a tractor or motorcycle radiator was off to the side. Well, we just figured someone had spilled some of their load all over the road. I hop out to move it... thinking back, I'll never do that again. Promise. I push it over to the side so we can get by... driving further down the road.. "Hey Sarah! Look! That guy must have dropped that stuff all along this road... wait a minute...uh, all that metal is attatched... to that... telephone pole, and maybe that wasn't a radiator 'cause it looks... like that box... up there... on that pole..." At this point, well, I honestly nearly peed my pants. I could have left those sweet children without a mommy! No touching anything on a road! Turns out to be the cable wire, but wow! that was too close. That big truck with the boom on it was the culprit!)
After letting the fabric heat up for a while in the sun, we (Sarah) washed it all out and ta-da! some really gorgeous fabric. How cool is that? Nearly turning myself into Southern fried chicken aside, I had the best time dying that fabric. It was loads of fun and I highly recommend anyone try it. And have you seen those cool "trips" of Darcie's? Made with her hand dyed fabrics and a feature print. Very, very nice.