Dyeing and Killing (a sink)

As many of you know, I went to Ricky Tims' quilt retreat back in September and began working on a very large quilt that I would like to enter into the AQS show at Paducah.  Unfortunately, Paducah's deadline is January 2nd, so if I do get it done, it will be done about twenty minutes before the deadline.  If I miss Paducah, I'll try for MQS or MQX later on in the year, or possibly the AQS show in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
In any case, the major obstacle to me working on my quilt (besides a baby and a business :), has been the fact that I needed to hand-dye all my fabric.  In the summer, this is not such a big deal for me because I use my greenhouse where I can slop dye around, wear my skivvies and generally not worry about making a mess.  However, dyeing requires it to be warm enough for the chemical reaction between the dye and cotton to take place.  My greenhouse is not heated and not insulated, so I haven't been able to get it done.

Luckily, my dear husband has been pushing me to get to work, so he said I could take over our laundry room.  This is actually ideal.  It's tile, has a drain in the floor, the washing machine is right there, and there's a nice big utility sink.  So I moved the cat food to another room, finished our laundry, and closed the doors for a Sunday of dyeing mania while dear husband watched little man.  I had already pre-washed my fabric, not so much for the washing, but to dry it on high and shrink it.  I don't want any shrinkage in the finished product because it has LOTS of curved seams, but also because I'm mixing 100% cotton with Robert Kaufman's Radiance, 55% cotton/45% silk, so there was a high potential for uneven shrinkage.

Then I soaked my huge piles of fabric in soda ash and lukewarm water.  How much you ask? A few scoops of soda ash and a big bucket of water.  That's how precise this step needs to be.  I used a fun tote/bucket that's all flexible and fun that I got at Target. 

I let that soak for pretty close to an hour.  It doesn't necessarily need to soak that long, but then I'm sure it's all saturated.  You should wear gloves for this stage and I highly recommend (with very blue fingers) that you purchase a nice, elbow length pair of heavy duty rubber gloves.  I used vinyl disposable gloves and they are terrible, and also tearable.  Hence the blue fingers.  

 

This is the result of about five hours of really messy, very physically intense work.  Before pre-washing my fabric, I measured individual pieces out for their places in the quilt, I tagged a corner with a sharpie and a number corresponding with the piece.  I then planned out (while my fabric soaked) exactly what color I wanted for each piece and how saturated (vibrant) I wanted the color to be and whether I wanted cotton or Radiance.  Ultimately the flaw in this plan is that once dyed, I can no longer see the numbers, making it a bit more challenging to assemble my quilt. In the future I will paint the number on the corner with white acrylic paint.  No matter, I dyed a significant amount of extra pieces so I would have some wiggle room as I pieced it together.  I also have plans for some related quilts, so having extra is a big fat bonus.  

As you can see from the picture above, I don't vat dye, per se, but I don't squeezy bottle dye either.  I mix my dye in some form of Tupperware, Gladware, Ziplocware, other random plastic containers that are cheap and disposable.  DO NOT USE metal.  The dye will react with the metal.  Ask me how I know. Luckily that disaster was early in my dyeing career, so I know better now.  I like disposable plastic because if I can't get it clean, I'm not out a bunch of money, but non-disposable Rubbermaid food containers seem the most stain resistant, so I'll let you be the judge. Anyway, I mix my dyes in these tubs, then I sqump (the technical term) my fabric around in the tub until I'm satisfied with the level of absorption, and then I let it sit in the extra.  Once I squeezed these pieces out, I put more fabric in to soak up more of the dye, but these pieces will always come out less vibrant because the little dye molecules have mostly bonded with the original piece. I also use a salt, perhaps Glauber's salt, whose name I can't remember, but is available from Dharma Trading Company.  This salt and dye do not get along.  This is exactly what I want for really vibrant, rich, saturated colors.  The salt pushes the dye into the fabric and out of the water since the dye wants to get away from the salt.  I have had the best luck mixing the dye, then adding the salt.  I found when I added liquid to the salt it crystallized into razor like chunks that guaranteed blue fingers.

 And some of the beautiful finished product!  They are very lightly mottled, some more dramatically than others.  This is the first batch I put through the wash.  I washed a total of about 20 yards of fabric at once, using Synthrapol detergent.  I washed this batch 5 times and then the water was clear (although it's hard to tell with that much blue fabric in a white washer if the water is clear or not).  The next batch had closer to 30 yds and I washed it about 6 before taking half out, washing the first half another 3 times before it was clear.  My last pile is still in the wash, and I will probably wash it 2-3 more times before I dry it. 

I'll post more once I have the fabric ironed and sorted so you can see the difference between the Radiance and the cotton.  I'm very happy so far.  I have a few flubs that I'll have to overdye or cut new pieces entirely, but mostly I got a lot of exactly what I was going for which is always a satisfying feeling.  I'll be bringing the whole lot to show and tell at LTQ's Block of the Month on Saturday, December 8th, if you'd like to see them and I'll be talking a little more in depth about my process.

The downside, and the Killing, of the dyeing process was that when I was getting ready to clean up Sunday evening, the drain and drain pipe of my laundry room sink, disintegrated, dumping blue dye and a whole lot of water all over my laundry floor, splattering me, my washer & dryer and generally creating a blue-sposion of staining power.  The sink died.  Then I got to spend a whole day contending with some very poor plumbing choices and trying to put the sink back together so I could clean up the room.  The plumbing took longer than the dyeing and was considerably less fun.

Happy Quilting!