A Good Day to Dye

I have ~3 yards of abstract textured velvet, and it’s supposed to be linen & cotton, which means I should be able to dye it.  The backing needs to be peacock blue & the pile needs to be a coppery brown.  Dye tests on a swatch were promising and it’s the only thing I found in local fabric stores that had a good texture and at least a usable color. 3 yards isn’t enough for all the coat panels, but I’m hoping to piece the lower ones so they look like whole panels.  Meanwhile I’m keeping an eye out for other options. 

The fabric was machine washed in hot water and dried multiple times to remove any finish & soften up the fibers.  I did this over a few days so it would be ready when I got a dry day to work outside.  I don’t want to get dye all over the bathroom, instead I’ll roll out plastic on the patio & paint the dye on, then let the fabric sit in the excess liquid.  I can roll that up & rinse in the laundry sink before doing final rinses in the washing machine and hopefully keep the dye out of the house.

Finally got that dry sunny day so…

I need to dye the cotton sweater to make the snood, as well as the velvet.  Both need the coppery brown.  The velvet needs the peacock backing done first, then the brown pile.

Chemistry lab

Using cotton ball for color check

Stirring the dye

I decided to vat dye the sweater, so I mixed up Procyon with salt & soda ash in a bucket.  I have a range of dye powders so I did a pinch of this & that until the color was what I wanted. Vat dyeing needs constant stirring or it will streak. I wanted the color to be uneven, so I didn’t stir it much.  I left the sweater in the bucket about 4 hours, then rinsed it & hung it to dry.  I wanted it darker so I put it back in for another couple hours, rinsed & dried again.  The peach sweater is now a rich textured brown. 

Brown-after

Peach-before

I rolled out plastic on the garage floor & rolled up the doors. It was sunny out but windy, so working inside seemed like a better idea than the patio.  I put the fabric back-side to the floor because I wanted to keep the blue out of the pile as much as possible.  I mixed up the dyes in buckets, folded the fabric in half longways & brushed on the blue dye one half at a time with a big nylon brush. Once the fabric was saturated I put it back-side down to soak in the drippings.  After a couple hours the blue looked nice & dark & the fabric was only damp, so I flipped the fabric over & did the same thing to the pile side with brown.  I wasn’t worried about the colors bleeding into each other, that would make it more interesting. 

Ready to paint on dye

First half of peacock blue 

Viewed in the sun, the pile didn’t seem to be taking on the color very well. There’s a silvery-gray sheen to it.  I painted layer over layer until I ran out of brown dye but it seemed like the dye wasn’t changing the pile color much at all.  Then when I rinsed, both colors rinsed out more than I wanted them to.  O well, that’s the breaks.  Just I case, I pulled out a can of brown spray-on upholstery color & sprayed some on.  It makes the fabric stiffer, but it doesn’t wash out.  I’m still open to better options, but I have a day tied up in “making” the coat fabric now (and I don’t know yet if I have enough to fake the parts I need because I haven’t created the pattern).

Velvet before

Velvet after

Finished piece in the sun with the taffeta. Cotton rag picked up that much brown from wiping my gloves, velvet should be the same color!