It's been a week for dyeing

This week I have been preparing samples for taping a Quilting Arts TV segment next month about creating dye color recipes.
Here's a little sneak peek

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Dyeing for some recipes

For the last week I have been creating new color dye recipes using Rit to match some of the 2011 Pantone Fashion colors for Spring and Fall that Rit does not presently have in their color formula guide, but will be adding soon.

I also spent some time mixing a few new colors using Rit's Aquamarine dye. It is such a pretty bright blue (upper right corner), I think right now you can only buy it online. It makes wonderful bright lime greens. If you click on the photo twice to get the largest image, you should be able to read the recipes if you want to try reproducing them.

The dye quanties in the recipes are for mixing liquid dye with one cup of boiling water in a small disposable plastic container and dyeing a peice of fabric about a foot square. If you want to dye a larger peice of fabric you will have to multiply the quantities of dye and water accordingly.

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Try your hand at the first Rit Creative Challenge!

1. Share Your Creativity
The first Rit Creative Challenge is themed around UPCYCLING, which is defined as:

Laying hands on potential throwaways and
breathing new life, quality and value into the result.

All you need to do is upload a do-it-yourself upcycling project to the community — a project that showcases some creative way you transformed a potential disposable to make it cool and new and useful, with at least the partial help of Rit Dye. Share “before” and “after” pictures of the project, the steps you took along the way, and the Rit Dye colors you used.

Indicate that you want your project to be entered in the contest, confirm that you’re at least 18 years of age, and you’re entered. Simple.

Share as many examples as you wish with the community: your fabulous fashions, your brilliant crafts, your crafty brilliance. If the panel of judges finds a project of yours is truly inspired — based on originality, creativity, and color sensibility — you could win $250 worth of DIY supplies. Not to mention some well-deserved exposure within the community and on our site.

(A tip: take inspiration from the Color Stories section of the RIT blog, where Team Rit points you to online dye ideas from creative colorists across the globe.)

Ready to roll up your sleeves?
 
2. Join The Community
The Rit Color Community is open to anyone interested in joining. They make colorful things with their hands, and they often share those things online at RitDye.com — in hopes of inspiring other folks to do the same.

The contest begins 12/6/10 and runs though 1/28/11. Official rules are here.

Remember this?

Last February I told you I was working on a project I couldn't talk about, well, now I can! I was dyeing silk for an article for Vogue Patterns Magazine. This is the August/September issue.

I dyed rayon/silk velvet with a variety of hand dye techniques using Rit dye to make a scarf using 6 rectangular panels of fabric that are sewn together in such a way that it creates an ever changing patterned scarf.

The rayon/silk velvet was dyed to match the fall fashion forecast colors using shibori, ombre, low water immersion and solid dye techniques, that are all explained in the article.  The scarf can be worn all scrunched up with lots of different fabrics showing or hang long and drape-y as shown on the mannequin. This was a really fun scarf to make from a Vogue pattern, I will definitely be making another for my fall wardrobe!

Dyeing silk with Rit

I am working on a project right now, sorry I can't tell you about it, you'll have to wait until summer before I can talk, but anyways, I have been dying silk dupioni and rayon-silk velvet with Rit dye. Holy cow the color is amazing. The silk dupioni dyes beautifully. The velvet is insanely rich with gorgeous deep color and it picks up lots of lovely texture. I was told it is because of the rayon, it takes the dye really well. So, I just thought those of you who are not comfortable with fiber reactive dyes would want to know, so you can start dyeing those Dharma scarf blanks to coordinate with every thing in your wardrobe.

Dyed Batting Pillows

I made these pillows from cotton batting for RIT to use in their booth at the CHA conference in Anaheim, CA.
Thanks for the pictures Jamie.
There's my quilt that was used in Quilting Arts TV episode 312 and for my article in the December 2008 issue of Quilting Arts magazine.

I also had a few things displayed in the Walnut Hollow booth. The CHA show looks like such an interesting convention, just imagine a whole convention filled with manufacturers of crafting products.

North Suburban Needle Arts Guild

This week I gave a lecture and taught two workshops for the North Suburban Needle Arts Guild. What a great guild, there are quilters, doll makers, beaders, knitters, etc., basically all kinds fiber artists. I taught Painting Fabric for Whole Cloth Quilts the first day and using Tsukineko Inks the second day.

Because I consider these technique classes where I am teaching people how to use these mediums I do not want them to stress out about coming up with an image or needing to be creative, they can do that after they have learned the techniques, so I provide images that I have drawn for students to work from.

I love seeing the different ways people paint the images. There were so many beautiful paintings, I wish we had time to take these through being quilted too. I would love to see the stitching bring out the details.

For the Tsukineko inks class I have students work from old copyright free engravings of flowers, vegetables, birds and insects. I like using these images because the lights and darks are very clear, helping with the shading. I teach two different techniques for applying the inks and I have students begin the class working on white fabric and then progress to more complex images on light hand dyed fabric (dyed with RIT in the microwave).
Such a fun group, we covered a lot of techniques, everyone was relaxed and did wonderful work.

I will be teaching these same two classes in April at the International Quilt Festival in Chicago, if you are interested in learning these techniques I would love to have you in my classes.

Caught in the act.

How could anyone resist a soft pile of freshly dyed cotton batting to snuggle up in? Unfortunately for Abby, that batting needed to be used for something else.


A project for RIT dye.

Mixing RIT dyes for new colors

When I was working on the project for RIT, I experimented with creating some of my favorite jewel tone colors. I found that I could create a really nice range of bright and earthy colors. These are some of my favorite color combinations.
The wonderful thing about low immersion dyeing is getting the range of values and sometimes little bursts of contrasting colors that can pop up when the different color dye molecules haven't fully mixed. I love that dark olive color.

If you would like the recipes for any or all of these colors you can find them over at my other blog Painted Threads Projects.

Dyeing Batting with Rit

Now that my article on low immersion dyeing with RIT from the December 2008 Quilting Arts magazine has been published, I can show you photos of the artwork I made for RIT to use on a segment of Quilting Arts TV for season 3. The third season should begin in January. The episode that RIT will be on also happens to have the segment that was taped in the spring at Quilt Festival Chicago where I demonstrate making Fiesta Ornaments.





These circles are cut from dyed Warm and White cotton batting and stitched with a blanket stitch on the sewing machine. If I had an easier time with hand work I would have loved to do all the stitching with embroidery floss to really make the stitches stand out. Dyed batting can be like a cheaper softer substitute for doing wool appliqué.

I think dyed cotton batting would make a great substrate for needle felting. I can imagine a whole landscape made from pieces of dyed batting and embellished on a felting machine with ribbons and roving for trees and flowers.



You can see the back of the 9 patch is one piece of dyed batting cut with a prairie point style edge. I used a leftover block cut in half on the diagonal to make the corners for hanging, with a piece of painted balsa wood to rest on a nail in the wall. This is a super easy way to hang small fiber art.

On the left is a detail from the abstract piece at the end of the article. The wavy lines of color running down the center is the dyed fusible interfacing. This is the soft nylon interfacing that is usually meant to be used with knit fabrics.

Below is a detail from the flower piece. The flowers and leaves are cut from batting and the centers of the flowers and leaves are fusible interfacing.

Dyeing with RIT

A month or two ago I mentioned that I had done a project for RIT dye for Quilting Arts TV. I actually made three projects for the RIT representative to use on the show because I had too many different ideas to stop at one. They taped the show at the end of August and it will air in Series 300. I have heard it will be on the same episode that I taped last spring at quilt Festival doing the Fiesta Ornaments. I would love to show you more but you will have to wait for the show or pics in Quilting Arts magazine.

I never used RIT dye before doing this project, I had no idea what the colors would be like or how to dye fabric with it, I have always used Procion. I think I was imagining that I would get dull 1970’s colors, you know dusty mauve, blue gray, goldenrod. I was really surprised by the colors that I got when I adapted it to a low immersion dye method, dyeing pieces of fabric in small containers of dye. These are all the RIT dye colors.

These are some of the colors I made mixing dyes.The basic recipe is:
one cup hot water to 2 tsp liquid dye or 4 tsp powder dye and one minute in the microwave. Increasing or reducing the dye quantity will make colors more saturated or lighter.

This quantity of dye solution will dye up to a 1/2 yard of fabric or roughly a fat quarter of cotton batting. I am writing an article about it now that will go into a lot more detail about the process.

One of the things that intrigued me about RIT was that it could dye some man made fibers. It won’t dye polyester but it will dye nylon, so the soft Pellon interfacing can be dyed, just don’t put it in the microwave, it will melt. This is how it looks.


I used the interfacing on two projects. I ended up melting a lot of the interfacing during my experimenting with dyeing it, so I didn’t have a lot to work with for the projects. I found if you put the interfacing in the hot water dye solution and leave it there for a couple minutes, that is enough to dye it. I made one piece fusing the interfacing to batting to make details on flowers and leaves and another piece that is abstract working with layers of batting and interfacing.

This was a really interesting project to do. I found there are definitely times when the speed and simplicity of using Rit comes in handy, not to mention the fact that it is non-toxic. There are also times when I will opt for using Procion. Each product has its benefits and drawbacks. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable using fiber reactive dyes for a number of reasons and RIT certainly provides a viable option for artists to use instead.