Screw ups teach, too!

Dye and paint day–always a day of experiments and the unknown.  Sometimes it’s just a typical hunk of fabric and globs of color. AJ was helping me on the rinse out of fabrics and said he really liked this one best.

That was NOT the screwed up piece. I was trying out thickened dye and stamps on this piece.

I’m liking the design and the color is actually a nice, dark blue. But after I had it stamped, I realized that it was NOT the soda soaked fabric and I had not added any soda ash to the dye mixture. I can’t wait to see what happens in the wash…even if it turns out to be a pale whisper of this, I can work with it. But I learned to take a bit more time and get the right combo of fabric and dye. I also learned that I am not fond of stamping with thickened dye but I need to do more of it before the final verdict is in. I have not used it with stencils or screens yet and I think it’s better suited to both of those methods.

I also love to hang fabric on the line and drip dye colors. I think I also neglected to soda ash this fabric! I will plead distraction, but this is a really dumb mistake.

I’m going to let today’s rain rinse this out but I may spray a little soda ash on it just to see what happens! I’m going to do a color comparison afterwards…

I sprayed soda ash on the blue and white one, too. It was already wet from the rain and starting to run, but I think it looks kind of cool with the blue running down. It will be very nice if the soda ash fixes some of the dye to the fabric after the fact. It may be like the way deconstructed screen printing works and give me an unexpectedly good result. We shall see………………….

Now to get to the rest of the rinse out…stay tuned.