A dyeing story

My dear friend Katrina is getting married in September. In honor of her nuptials I am creating quite the sewing masterpiece. I don't want to say much about what I am making right now but I can't wait to share it with you when I am finished. I needed some dark purple/plum colored fabric for this creation and in all the yardage I have in huge Rubbermaid bins in my house, none of it was the right color purple. So I decided to dye some of my lighter color fabric.

Dyeing and I have a long tumultuous history. I do not claim to be an expert in dyeing fabric but through years of trial and error I have figured out how to (for the most part) dye successfully. I wasn't a 100% sure what all

these fabrics were (cotton takes color the best, but also shrinks ) and some of them I just wanted to see what would happen.

I added two boxes of purple dye and a bottle of wine colored dye to a washer of hot salt water (adding about 1/2 a cup of salt helps the color take). I like dyeing things in the washer because it drains the water and rinses the fabric. I realized after I put in the dye that it was too pink so ran back to the craft store to buy more purple. The woman who checked me out for the second time must have thought my purple tinted fingertips and purple speckled hands were pretty amusing.

And 30 minutes later I had purple fabric! And, because of a piece of woven cotton that decided to unravel in the dye bath, a lot of purple fuzz all over my apartment. You can tell that some of the fabric doesn't take the dye as well as others, thus the varying shades. But all in all it was a success. Isn't dyeing fun?