The Tweedles in Colorland

Or maybe I should say, "Two happy days of living under the rainbow!". This picture was even taken after an unprecedented July rain. My friend, Sharon and I recently adventured into creating hand dyed fabrics and other items. This is an event that we have talked about for some time and finally managed to feel confident enough to jump into little puddles of color and just create.

The coloring started by mixing our 20 plus dyes with urea water in individual little cups. We could then pick

and choose which colors to add in a direct dye method. How fun to see the colors explode onto the fabrics and to be able to lay a variety of colors next to one another.

I also tried my hand at wax resist or batik. I think this was probably on my unofficial bucket list of things to do.

However!!! When you add rain
to wax....






You get something that looks like...

The batik process may have been cut short, but I was still able to get some really fun fabrics out of the two days. Calling this fabric group Orange Slice. The process consisted of applying wax to white fabric, (leaving 1/2 of the fabric un-waxed) dyeing it orange. Then I waxed the orange 1/2 yard of fabric and discharged the

color from the background. I'm already planing my next dye and discharge colors!!

 These wild orange flowers started with a potato stamp and then used a tjanting tool to make the petals.

And then, just how much color is too much color on one yard of fabric? The brown and the green fabrics started as a single unit. After I had added the smaller, darker triangles I cut the fabric in half. One side I dyed in deep orange for the brown background and the other half was dyed in chartreuse for the green background.

This was way more fun than any old coloring book, but I can see it will certainly take some planning to ensure a successful dye process.

Happy coloring!
Tana