I've been working on dyeing cotton lace these days as opposed to rayon. With the rayon lace I have little bottles of dye which I mix with water, very, very simple. Cotton is much more complicated. I have fiber reactive dyes that I have to wear a mask when mixing with water. The water is mixed with urea, and then the things to be dyed have to soak in sodium carbonate or soda ash. I've used this kind of dye to dye lace solid colors before, but this time I'm trying to "paint" them using more than one color, trying to get the same water color effect I get from the rayon dyes.
The first thing I dyed was unbelievably ugly and I didn't know any better than to use something too nice for my first attempt and pretty much ruined a good deal of it. The recipe for the dye solution I used was for colors that were way too dark and they also didn't run into one another, which was one of the things I wanted to do.
So I tinkered with the formula and came up with amounts of dye that work better for my purposes, the original dyes I mixed up I'll use as concentrates and dilute with however much water I want, depending on the exact color I'm trying for. I've been working on this for a couple of weeks with mixed results, some things better than others.
Can you tell I'm fascinated by the gradations of color? Well, if you can't yet, you will before I'm through. I remind myself of the woman in the Alan Alda movie, The Four Seasons. She was played by Sandy Dennis and her big thing was taking giant photographs of vegetables. Slowly. All her friends secretly thought this was inane, but never admitted it to her.
See what I mean? I'm having fun, though. I'll either sell them in my barely started store Twist of Vintage II, or I'll use them for a project or two or three....
Unfortunately, my rubber gloves broke this morning and I look like a Pict, the original blue man (or woman) with blue dye all over my hands.
I added two new items to the store tonight also, one a very elaborate, embellished belt, the other a skirt I upcycled and added hand-dyed lace etc to.
I have a bunch of other things to add, but can't do it all at once. I'm getting to the point where I have too many different projects going at the same time, surprise, surprise. I like variety. As another person wrote in their Etsy profile, I don't have a niche. I like to experiment with different things for the fun of it. But I am surprising myself with my experiments with color, I didn't really know I had an interest in color for it's own sake till now. My yarn dyeing experiments weren't too successful, but now I realize I expected instantaneous results and didn't practice as much as I should have to get a decent result. Now I know.
