A Day to Dye

On Tuesday evening a had a trawl around the  blogs on Quilting Bloggers and came across this one, called Quilt Routes, authored by Deborah O'Hare, who does lots of luscious things with fabric.  In particular was a page devoted to Fabric Paint Techniques.  So come Wednesday morning, (Wednesday is my work day off) I went to the utility room, firstly to tidy the worktop there and then get my fabric paints out.  I am impatient with proper dyeing as I like to see results and not have to wait to see if something has worked or not, so fabric painting suits me better.

I had a go at the layering technique but I think the paint that I have is thicker and I took it straight out of the little pot not having anything to hand to pour into.  Also with my clearing out I found that some paints have become old and not much left in them, but hey ho, this is all part of the fun.  I had some blue and want to mix in some yellow, which by this time was all used up, so I added some limey green Setacolour paint that had some shimmer.

Above is what the fabric looked like just painted.  This was folder while wet and I put it over the airer on top of a plastic bag until dry

 This was the back (I liked the effect better)

and the front, with the limey paint with shimmer, I like that little bit of sparkle.

I'd also used some blue, yellow and a few dabs of purple on very damp cloth and rubbed together to merge the colours and added some sea salt which produced this lovely piece of fabric, this was another of Deborah's techniques, but went a little mad on the salt.  Think I'll be a bit more subtle next time, not bad though.

Some time ago I was shown shaving foam dyeing, and I still had some shaving foam in the cupboard, but it is old and a bit flat but still used this until I couldn't get any more out of the paint and foam

 Below is the first bit of dyeing, a bit blobby, the second one the paints merged a bit to give a marble-y effect and the bottom photo shows more and even more merged effect this time on paper

I then had a go a a technique on Terri Stegmiller's blog, from which she made Valentine's cards.  I have a few mask stencils and chose a flowery one on hand.  I only had one spray colour in lilac so sprayed that over the stencil.  I then tried to water down a metallic bronze Stewart Gill paint, but it's too old and thick to use and ended up with blotches on another card, so I think that paint will have to go. The heart was made from a previous fabric paint exercise.

None of it may be perfect but I had fun with playing around.

Yesterday I was invited to join some friends for a Sewing Saturday, which was a nice relaxing day of sew and chat.  My workshop machine hadn't been used for a while and it was a bit noisy but after warming up a bit was sewing like a dream.  I made 3 more Scrappy Trip blocks to add to the 11 already made with another in progress.