Fabric Dyeing Crossover

My good friend Pat has been visiting me for a few days and despite the gorgeous weather and our joyful ventures out to the local wineries and quilt shops, we have been playing in my studio quite a bit.

Today we washed, dried and ironed the results of a fabric dyeing crossover technique. It was so fun.

This simple technique takes 2 colours of dye and crosses them over in 8 bags of fabric. You can do a half yard for each bag (previously treated with soda ash and salt).You put a cup of soda ash solution in each bag then add the dyes gradually increasing quantities of the first dye in the bags from 1 to 8 and the same quantities of the second dye in the bags from 8 to 1. Add the fabric, scrunch and slosh, leave for 4 hours or more and voila! The result turns out something like this: 

It is so fun! You can see we have a bit of a mottled effect in the blues. The more you slosh around the fabric in the bag and mix the dye thoroughly, the more even your colour will be. As artsy as we are, we just happen to like the element of surprise.