An Addendum , A Card and Some Hombre Dyeing!!

One of my blog followers pointed out that I had forgotten yet again to post pictures of the hand dyed threads that I purchased from Laura Wasilowski!! So Sorry about that!! It seems that I can't get entirely thru a task these days without forgetting something!!!! SIGH!!
I bought two different sizes of the Perle cottons in the eggplant colorway- I simply cannot resist anything purple and green!! the other two hanks are both #8 perle cottons. Laura's threads are so beautiful because of their intense vibrancy and the wonderful color shifts that she is able to achieve without a hint of muddiness!! The multi-colored hank at the end is the group of threads that we were given as part of the class. They are long gone- stitched on my poppy quilt. There, I feel better, No more dangling pictures, so sorry to leave you hanging!!!
Laura sells 52 different color ways of threads in both cotton and silk and you can purchase them here!!
After my birthday, I had several thank you's to write so I stitched up a few more of my collage floral photo notes. I am really having fun with this little project as I am using up old duplicate prints of floral shots form a time before the era of the digital camera. this card went to a very dear friend who actually gave me the seeds to this flower that you see here. This is an old fashioned columbine, a true pass-along plant, that would bloom it's fool head off in the heat in my Oklahoma garden. I am pleased to have found a way to combine collage, stitch and old left over photos to create unique cards for any number of occasions.

I also fooled around with my Procion MX dyes to see if I could achieve some color gradations of my own. I had such fun working with the fabric in the class and I wanted to see if I could do some of my own without turning everything to a muddy brown. I seem to have figured it out!!!

In these two pictures you can see that I got yellow -orange -pink-red colorway and then various blues ( I used PMX Ice Blue and Royal Blue) turquoise- green -yellow!!! I got nice mid range colors and very little white!!!! Here is how I did it- this was pure experimentation on my part!!!
1. I soaked the fabric strips (approx 15 inches wide) in soda ash solution.
2. wrung out fabric.
3.Hand pleated the fabric at both long ends and lay down the resulting fabric pleated strip along a long piece of saran wrap.
4. Using a foam brush I painted on the dye starting with lightest color first- Yellow- for about 5 inches.
5. Then went in with next color, either Cherry Blush or Turquoise and overlapped the yellow by about 2 inches. So the yellow and pink gave me the orange and the yellow and turquoise gave me green.
6. Next color was straight cherry Blush or Turquoise and then I overlapped those colors with Turkey Red and Royal , respectively.
7. When the fabric was saturated but not swimming in dye, I grabbed each end of the scrunch pleated fabric and twisted the pleated fabric nice and tight, rolled it up in the saran wrap and left the dye saran wrap sausage out in the heat and humidity to batch.
I think the saran wrap tube separator really helped with preventing any mixing of dye colors and gave me the results that I was after.

Every once in awhile blind experimentation based on a bit of fore thought works out!!
WHOOO HOOOO!!!!