Still Couching.

 

I'm still working on the "Cumulative Spiral" couching effort for my Stretching Art & Tradition quilt. It's fiddly and kind of close-up. I decided not to mark or pin or glue, but I still am working to a sort of plan/design. The thread vs. the baker's twine that I'm using is playing well together visually. But the baker's twine is sometimes getting stuck on the needle, and on the thread above the needle. So that's a little annoying, but I'm sticking with it and trying to go slow enough to notice when there's a problem developing.

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Every now and then I have to stand up and see what it is that I've couched. I'd say "So far, so good", I'm almost up to the top, which means I'm almost done. Noticing how much I truly love stitching on my hand-dyed fabrics, it's somehow still quite a thrill. That means I really do need to keep on dyeing. (note the e in the word)

The Wearable Portion

For the wearables portion of the endless dyeing content:I took some pictures of the linen/rayon that I dyed to use for the lining of my Y.E.S. coat as it was hanging up to dry the rest of the way. It's somewhat wrinkly and a bit damp from the dryer. Shoot, now that I write this, I'm realizing that I should have ironed it while it was damp.

The black pin stripe shows up nicely.

I got some good mottling and variation.

A teensy bit of red/pink splitting but not too bad overall for this sort of dye.

I also dyed this mock turtleneck tunic for myself. It has one diagonal seam (with one odd pocket) and a floaty hem. I like it, but I may overdue it.

A close up of the odd pocket.

And a shot of the tank tops and bamboo socks I also dyed. I'm all set now for dyed clothes I think.
 

2 Hits 2 Misses

 

Here are the 2 yards of Cotton Couture that I also dyed. Three of them are attempts at matching some Temperature Quilt colors. The brown one is an older mixed dye that I had in my dye box, Palomino Gold from Dharma Trading. It's quite a nice brown, but as I've now learned in class, a lot of these dyes have reds that can be problematic.

See those spots and streaks of fuchsia? That was in the dye mixture, and that one dye is harder to dissolve completely in solution, so it can streak and spot very unpredictably. Thus the lesson on how to get to a brown that you like, without using the more tempermental reds. I'm going to over dye this one to hide the ickiness of those red spots and streaks.

Yet again another beautiful pinkish purple, but not even close to the 25-30° color. These are all of my attempts to get close in one photo. Nice colors, sure, but not *that* color.

Finally got close enough for the 71-75° range. 

Here are the greens I dyed to get there.

And another close enough color match for the navy, 46-50° range. I really like the mottling I got on these one, I used a much smaller container.

Here are all the lovely blues I dyed on my way to getting there.

Step One

 

Here's my step one results from the Dye Mastery class on dyeing full yardage. This is a yard that was flag-folded as I wrote about here.

It will be over-dyed in step two, but I'm so far very pleased with the results.

Oooh, ahhh, this flag-folded one is very complex even before getting into a second dye bath.

The flag-folded manipulation was very effective.

This one had a bunch of rubber banded "circles" that I tried intentionally to make as wonky as possible. Success!

This looks like the outline of a Hawaiian island to me. 

Can't wait to over-dye all three of these beauties tomorrow.

Into June

 

I laid out the June column for the Temperature quilt yesterday. And I noticed an error? A miscalculation? The red piece for May 13th was representing a day that was 94°F. The one in the layout for June 30th is supposed to be representing 97°F.. So it should look like a different color, but it's doesn't. 

Here's another view of the color difference/sameness.

The red-orange and the red color just don't read differently enough from a distance. Here you can see how different they are close up.

So I'm taking out the red that's reading too close to the 94°F day. That's the stack of pieces on the right. I'm  moving the temperature range up a step. 

Now to cut a few out for the 101-105°F that will be in the more hot pink range.

That's much better for June 30th! I just want June to get the credit for having a 97°F day I guess.

Last week on dye day, I tried one more time to match the 25-30°F weirdo mauve color. This is the one I'm pretty sure was painted with diluted SetaColor. As you can see, I'm not even close, but what a lovely purple that one is. Hopefully we won't have an extended super cold spell for the rest of the year, and I should be okay.

I did finally match the 36-40°F range which is good because I'm definitely going to need some more of this temperature.

I'm also happy enough with the 71-75°F matching attempt. That's good because there's a lot of days in this range for the upcoming months in my piecing journey as I go through the temperature year that was.

Mixed Colors Unit

Here's the most recent results from the dyeing class I'm taking. There were three different "experiments' of various mixtures of colors assigned, each is shown in one column. These are all combined in the dye solution, not over-dyed like in the previous units.

First up, on the left, trying for various shades of a color. Combinations of dye colors from top to bottom: Red-Orange+Violet, Blue-Violet+Red-Orange, Violet+Orange, Red-Violet+Orange

Next, on the right, Analogous combinations, from top to bottom: Yellow-Green+Green, Blue+Blue-Violet, Blue-Green+Green, Red+Violet-Red

 Finally on the right, Complementary color combinations. From top to bottom: Yellow+Violet, Red+Green, Yellow-Green+Violet-Red, Blue-Violet+Yellow-Orange.

I think this one is my favorite out of the twelve. Sure, it looks kinda like a bruise, but the way the colors split and combined as well as the patterning from the rubber bands in the upper right really look like something to me.

I'm really learning a lot more about how the pure colors work alone and in combination, this is going to be really useful going forward. 

Color+GrayX2

 
Here are the results of the second part of the toning with grey lesson in the Dye Mastery class that I'm currently taking. This is the same 12-step color wheel with a less color and more gray dyes used.

So interesting that the upper left Yellow is such an olive color. The violet and blue violet were only slightly affected. Fascinating stuff, huh?

I really like that red-orange in the upper left corner of this one. 

As usual one of my favorite things about dyeing is the wonderful dyed threads that result.

More about the Temperature Quilt dyeing, there were some absolute failures like this one above. Although this turned out to be a gorgeous pink purple with a lot of variation that I really love. This fabric I'm trying to match I've realized was not dyed, but instead painted with SetaColor. So if we have a cold spell over these last two months of the year, I'll try painting some. So far I have enough to cover all the 25-30F days so far this year with lots to spare.

There was also some success. This is will be one of the most used colors this year (76-80F), so now I have plenty.

This one was a happy accident, I was trying for one color range but succeeded in dyeing the next one that I also needed. So it all works out. This is also a popular temperature range this year 36-40F, so I'm happy to have enough now.

I'm now realizing that I haven't ever tried to dye an exact matching color before, and it's quite a lot harder than one would think. Especially when there's no notes from back then to go off of. I'm learning, so now there are notes! The result is a lot of colors that I really enjoy and will use, so it's all good.

Grey+Color

 I took the weekend off for family stuff mostly, but I did finally get to washout my dyeing efforts from Friday on Sunday. So these babies were in the dye pots and bags for a while. This is the results of the toning with grey exercise from the Dye Mastery class that I'm taking.  

Just by using a small amount of grey, the same 12 step color wheel definitely looks a lot different. That's yellow up in the top left corner, now a nice olive.

I'm pretty pleased with the results and now I get to try doing the second part of that lesson.

Here are my most recent efforts to produce some more useable dyed fabric for the Temperature Quilt. I've hit it right on with some of them, others are way way off. So that will be another part of what I'm dyeing tomorrow.

I started putting up the next month's worth of pieces for the May column of the Temperature Quilt and got stopped halfway through because I'd run out of the fabric that represents some of the more common temperatures. 

Now I can get back to cutting and carry on assembling the columns. They go together pretty fast once I get them laid out.

Using hand-dyed fabrics for this quilt was going to be a risk in just this way, I predicted it. But, I'm really enjoying doing the work to try and get close enough. Thankfully with the variation in the dyed fabrics I've already used, it'll work out pretty soon.

Mostly Analogous

 

Here's the promised group shot of all the over-dyed strips. I've arranged them in the same order as the FQ group shot..

Turns out the Yellow group is the only one I did "correctly" or as per the class instructions. All of the over-dyed colors were supposed to follow this scheme: analogous to the right on the color wheel of yellow, analogous to the left on the color wheel of yellow and finally the complement of yellow. So two adjacent analogous colors and one opposite on the color wheel complement. My favorite of this group is the complement with the over-dye of violet. Left to right: Yellow, yellow-orange, green, violet. 

For some reason, I did the complement correctly for the next color, Yellow-Orange, but then instead of doing two analogous colors to Yellow-Orange, I did two more complements Blue-Violet and Violet, but analogous to the complement (Blue), not the original color. The correct colors to over-dye would have been Yellow and Red. So...my over-dye work except for the Yellow group is very very different than the rest of the classes' work. But luckily, I really like them quite a lot. The patterning especially is super interesting to me, some of these almost look like plaid tartans.

From left to right: Orange, Orange and Violet, Orange and Blue-Green, Orange and Blue. The blue one is So Dark and mysterious, in person there are so many colors creating so much depth.

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Red-Orange, Red-Orange and Blue-Green, Red-Orange and Green, Red-Orange and Blue.

Red, Yellow, Blue-Green, Green

Red-Violet, Yellow, Yellow-Orange, Green. 

Violet, Blue-Green, Orange, Yellow

Blue-Violet, Orange, Yellow, Yellow-Orange

Blue, Red, Yellow-Orange, Orange

Green, Violet, Orange, Red

Blue-Green, Red-Violet, Orange, Red

Yellow-green,violet, red, red-violet.