Fabric dyeing

A quilt I made from my hand dyed fabrics and some commercial batiks.

Tonight I finally got around to dyeing some fabric. I’ve been wanting to do it for a couple of months, but couldn’t afford the fabric, but when I was away at quilt camp a couple of weeks ago I found Kona Egyptian cotton on sale for $4.70 US / yard which wasn’t great, but wasn’t awful either. I bought five yards, enough to make 20 fat quarters.

I decided to do a mix of two colors and see what kinds of orange and peach fabrics I could make. There were two reasons for this: 1) I’m tired of making rainbows and not using some of the colors and 2) I have a quilt in mind that will be predominantly peachy orange.

I based the dye recipe loosely on the “A12 Yellows and Pinks” recipe by Melissa, a fabric dyer from Ontario, Canada. You can see her recipe on her blog.

I used her method too, of soaking the fabrics in the soda ash rather than adding the soda ash to the dye water. I’ve never tried this method before and I’m anxious to see if I notice any difference from the way I’ve done it previously. I needed at least two cups of soda ash, but discovered I only had about one cup of it left in my dyeing stash! This necessitated a quick trip to the pool supply store!

I used Golden Yellow and Chinese Red Procion MX dyes from Dharma Trading Company.

I mixed 2 teaspoons of yellow dye with 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons water and mixed 1 teaspoon red dye with 5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon water. I realized this would not be enough yellow dye for a ten-color gradation, so I added a bit of water to the yellow. (Didn’t measure, sorry!)

I did the ten-color gradation using these ratios of yellow to red: (All measurements are in teaspoons unless otherwise noted.)

1. 2 tsp : 3 drops
2. 2 tsp : ¼ tsp
3. 1 ½ tsp : ½ tsp
4. 1 ½ tsp : ¼ tsp
5. 1 tsp : 1 tsp
6. ½ tsp : 1 tsp
7. ½ tsp :1 ½ tsp
8. ¼ tsp : 2 tsp
9. 1/8 tsp : 4 tsp
10. 6 drops : 2 tsp

I topped up each dye container with 1 cup of water. I had a small amount of yellow dye left over, but squirted it down the sink before  realizing I should have kept it. I had a lot of red dye left over so I just used it to make a solid red piece.

I squeezed the soda ash out of the fat quarters and tucked each one into its container. I squished them down into the dye as much as I could, but I didn’t worry if some areas stuck up a little since I want mottled fabrics. I plan to let them cure overnight tonight and tomorrow we’ll see what I get.

If this batch turns out half decent, I plan to do another batch, mixing up a yellow and a blue to make a run of greens.

The yellows I have are:

• Lemon yellow (primary)
• Deep yellow
• Marigold

The blues I have are:

• Turquoise (primary)
• Cobalt
• Navy
• Sky

Any suggestions of what combination I should try? I’m open to ideas! You can see all these colors at the Dharma Trading link above.

I only have 9 fat quarters left. Now I’m wishing I could get a whole bolt of fabric!