Charity shops are a great source for cotton sheeting for bulk dyeing and I was lucky enough to find some high thread count double sheets which absorbed the dye well. I made up colour batches using magenta, purple and navy and then combined the above in various quantities.( I made a note of all my recipes so that I could always replicate). I did the same with olive, golden yellow and navy. Into each bowl of dye I put scrim, muslin, cotton lawn, cotton percale and linen. As a rule, the denser the weave, the deeper the colour. I found it easier to achieve deeper dyed pinks and purples than yellows and greens and assume this is to do with the relative translucency of the pigments.
As I had lots of dye left over, I made up some hanks of different threads and yarns and dyed these too. Because they contained varying percentages of natural/manmade fibre the take up of the dye resulted in a spectrum of shades.
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| Results of Batch Dyeing |
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Assorted fibre yarns and threads that
were hand dyed |
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| Dye recipe swatches |
This activity left me itching to stitch and I used some of my cloth and threads to cover a journal I made for my holiday. I combined them with inked and burnished tissue paper,beads and a shisha.
And created dye recipe swatches too...I've read about those....!!! :-)
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