Thursday 4th Feb 2010 Committed 2 Cloth

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, Friday, my second Wet'n'Wild workshop with Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan of C2C. Last month we spent the day learning about dyes, how they react according to temperature, water softness, room humidity etc., and the use of chemicals such as soda ash, urea and salt.

We completed stage one of our family dyeing session, and produced twelve fat quarters, dyed to a colour of our choice, but in three values. That meant that we each ended up with four fat quarters in one of three values of our chosen colour. This process was done in buckets. I decided to go for a mixture of turquoise and royal blue, because I had this idea in my head of going for a range of seaside colours.

Tomorrow, we will be overdyeing some of these pieces, and to give me the seaside colours I want, I shall probably go for a yellow ochre shade, giving me, hopefully, some greens as well as the blues, and some sand colours. Watch this space! Left are the results of the first dyeing process.

We also dyed a one metre piece, and we had the choice of going for flat colour or texture. This piece of fabric will be used later to over-dye, print on, discharge, or paint on, so I decided to go for flat colour. If I had chosen texture, it would have meant that my dye bath didn't need the addition of urea, and wouldn't have needed any agitation. I decided to mix magenta and black, which has given me a lovely rich plummy colour.