More Pole Dyeing.

hand under-pained in blue/ warm yellow and cool yellow
over dyed with red

As we were getting ready for lunch on Saturday,  Jan suggested that we freely under-paint a piece of cotton that was not soda soaked. We then had to let it batch over night and we would dye it the next day. These unfixed pieces were forbidden in the work room... they stayed in the hallway until we were ready to dye them again.

I used a foam brush and blended the cool yellow warm yellow and blue throughout the piece.

The next day I folded it randomly in thirds diagonally and pushed it down the pole without strings. It was over-dyed with a strong red. Since the batched  dye was not fixed Jan referred to these dye sessions as dirty dyeing as you could pick up stray dye from someone else work. I never noticed it.

folded in half, wrapped diagonally on pole,
twisted  and wrapped with string

This piece shows the way the dye gets lighter on the inner layers of the wrapped fabric. The string makes the crisper marks rather than the more organic marks that occur when you just push it down and compress the fabric without wrapping with string.

over dyed  string
wrapped with a masking tape mask

Sunday we were encouraged to play and try lots of ways of making resists. Here is one of my favorites. The lighter blue stripes occurred when I put masking tape over a pale teal from Sat. and then dyed it in a rich brown. It was rolled onto the pole horizontally and compressed without string. I wold love to see this in wool... but have NO experience in dyeing wool.

folded in half and stitched to make a sleeve
 then pushed down the pole

Jan also brought along an ancient Singer portable machine and showed us how to use it to make sleeves to fit the poles. You could make several sleeves on one width of fabric... but I didn't get to that. I did plan one out on my commute home Sat. night and was pleased that I had actually been fairly accurate in my visualization. I do think this would be great in a raw silk for a man's scarf.


There are many more samples, but this gives you a sense of what happened. It was a terrific class and even more fun was a bit of reunion as three ArtCloth Network folks were there. I wish I had remembered my camera as my class mates did some spectacular work.