Hot Hot Fabric

Here's a few of the pieces that I tray-dyed yesterday in all that hot hot weather. Quick and easy to do and always a surprise how it turns out. Definitely too hot for ironing it so that will have to wait.

Feelin' Hot Hot Hot

It got to 44 deg C today (thats 111 deg F) . Much the same yesterday and expected to be the same tomorrow. So what do you do when your hot hot hot? Well I've been itching to do some direct dyeing for a while but that would need space to spread out fabric and that would mean working in the shed. Definately not a job to do in this heat so I contented myself with some tray dyeing. I have quite a bit of print fabric that I want to overdye. You don't see the print on the reverse side of the fabric and when it's been dyed it doesn't look any different to plain fabric. Turns something I wouldn't use into some thing useable and doesn't cost anything.

Tomorrow I'll show you how it turns out.

Results of the Dyeing Day

This is the result from all those little containers in the last post. It's about 10 metres or so. They always look totally different once they're washed and ironed. Think I'd better get myself motivated to actually do something with them. The problem is often not a lack of ideas but too many ideas. This becomes indecision - which becomes procrastination. Does anyone else get like this?

Another dyeing day

When you run your own business from home, one of the benefits is deciding 'its too hot to work today'. Given that I work from a large metal shed this is not so unreasonable. Sewing in there on a day like this is just a bit too warm so I've been inside with the air-con on full blast having a lovely time dyeing this afternoon. Yes, I know this photo looks much the same as the last dyeing one I posted. Thats how I do it when I'm only working with smaller pieces. Can't show you the finished pieces till tomorrow. I've put it all the containers outside in the heat to 'age' :] I'll wash it out in the morning.
I'm going to take up Susan's challenge to do the '6 weird things about me' MeMe she has just done on her blog. I've been thinking about it all day and having trouble limiting it to only 6 :] Well you already know a couple from my previous post. Might just need a bit longer to think about it.

dyeing the rejects

Even after so many years of hand dyeing fabric I still sometimes end up with pieces that don't quite look as good as I would have liked. They might be a bit pale and wishy washy or a blah colour or for what ever reason end up in the pile I mentally label 'don't think I'd use that in a million years'. I've been looking at this pile of rejects recently and thinking 'overdye'. Why waste perfectly good fabric if I can turn it into something I could see myself more likely to use. So every now and then when I get the urge I toss a bunch of them into small buckets and play. This urge came upon me at about midnight last night. I've just washed them out and hung them on the line but it looks as if we're about to get a storm here very soon so I might have to dash out and grab them.