City & Guilds Level 3 Machine Embroidery - Class 4, 07/01/11

Our original class date had been 3rd December, but the heavy snow falls and icy conditions at the time meant that this had to be cancelled.

Anyway, this day was our 'dyeing day' when we had a go at tray dying and microwave dying, although for my purposes I actually did some dying in plastic bags in an endeavour to create strong plain colours that could be useful for my finished wall hanging.

The dye used throughout was Procion MX which our tutor supplied and mixed for us and we all contributed towards the cost of as this seemed the best way for a group working together in a classroom environment.  The tray dying was mostly done in (clean!) cat litter trays.  We soaked the pieces of fabric first in a bucket of soda ash solution, and then added the dyes to the damp fabric and left them in the tray for a few hours to 'take'.  We mixed the dyes to try and create blends and patterns, screwed up or folded the fabric, added a few resists here and there (tied up with string, stitching, tying knots around plastic shapes etc) and generally experimented.  After the few hours the fabric pieces were rinsed in plain water and inspected to see how they turned out, and if what happened was what we expected!

The microwave dying involved a similar process, but we tended to spray the dye onto the fabric in a more controlled manner, sometimes adding rock salt or similar to give distorting effects, and used a range of fabric types (plain, already patterned, calico, silk, linen, lace - although nothing that had any metal fibre in it to the best of our knowledge as that's not a good idea in the microwave!).  The fabric pieces were put into a suitable microwaveable container, eg plactic ice cream box, covered with/wrapped in microwaveable cling film and 'cooked' for a couple of minutes.  After cooling the pieces were again rinsed in plain water and the results examined.


Here are my samples from the micorwave dying.  It was obvious that the natural fibres generally took the dye better than the man made fibres, although there were a couple of variances.

 As mentioned above, because I knew that for my wall hanging I would be using BU corporate colours I wanted to see if I could produce some pieces of fabric that were plain dyed with strong colours as near as I could achieve to these with what was available on the day.  In order to do this I did something different to my classmates.  I had brought along a few threads and pieces of plain fabric either in white or a neutral colour.  I then made up 5 bags with the same set of sample pieces in each and added dye to these in the hope of achieving black, lime, hot pink, sunshine yellow, and orange.  I sealed the bags and left the samples soaking in the dye mix for over 24 hours, not rinsing them until I was at home the next day.  Here is a picture of the results as stuck into my sketchbook.

On the whole I was really pleased with the results.  The most disappointing was the black which really looks like a dark blue/charcoal colour on all of the samples.  However, on the whole the rest of the samples have turned out very well for a first attempt.  ;o)

There are a couple of things that need to be remembered when looking at these.  Firstly the 'original' colour squares stuck at the top of each column are printed  on while paper using a colour laser printer at work.  However, I've noticed that when I print using the different printers we have, even though they are all industrial laser printers from the same manufacturer, the finished colours can vary.  However, I don't need precision for this so I'm happy that I was able to produce 4 out of the 5 very close to what I was looking for, and certainly close enough to be able to use snippets of them to add colour to my project.

The other thing to remember is that I didn't mix the dye solutions, nor did I keep any record of how much dye was added to each bag, and I had to mix the colours available on the day to create what I thought looked like it might turn out OK.  That being the case I couldn't guarantee to achieve exactly the same results again if I needed to dye more of the same fabric.  Clearly if I was seriously trying to achieve specific results I would need to be take a bit more of a scientific approach in the future.