The photo above is my results of a two-day dyeing session. By the way, is it "dyeing" or "dying"?
This is a two-color gradation of fuchsia and bronze. A few years ago I had tried my hand at hand dyeing and found that I wasn't happy with my results so I stopped. I even got rid of all my dye and chemicals. I think the main reason I wasn't happy with my results back then is because I wasn't using very good fabric. The colors weren't bright and lively, but dull and well, just plain dull.
So now that I know I can achieve some great results I have been in a dyeing kick. I think I've gone through about 40 yards of fabric to this point. I have used some of the fabric for my deconstructed screen printing trials.
Well anyway, so at one point I used to have some books on dyeing. Yep, got rid of those too, way back when. So here I am trying to remember how to do two-color gradations. I have a pretty good idea on what needs to be done, but I just wanted to double check. So I started searching the web for some tutorials on gradations. I found a few and they pretty much confirmed what I thought I knew. But there was one thing, okay maybe two, that I didn't remember, or perhaps it's that I hadn't ever seen it before. The information I was finding was telling me to take and give equal amounts of dye and water in order to gradually change the shade, and in the end they said to dump the remaining dye down the sink. Huh? Why waste perfectly good dye? Nuh uh! Not gonna happen! So I dumped the remaining amounts of dye into a bucket and added a piece of fabric. The piece shown all alone in the top of the photo above is this piece. Pretty lovely piece of cloth, and just think, they wanted me to dump that down the drain.
So anyway, another thing I didn't remember when doing this two-step thingy, was to create two pieces of fabric with just the pure colors of fuchsia and bronze. Sigh! All