Dye Job

One of the pleasures of quilting is dyeing one’s own fabric, but it’s not so much a pleasure up here in the Pacific Northwest because it’s not hot enough most of the time.  Well, one could do it indoors, but it’s a messy activity in my hands and the thing about spreading dye around absent-mindedly is that it tends toward permanency: that’s why it’s called dye and not color.

But this summer has had day after day when the outdoor conditions were perfect for dyeing.  Contrarily, I managed to take advantage of not one of those days.  Now that we are having the summer extended period, I figured I had better try for at least one day and today was the day.  Also, since I am making some efforts to get a handle on all the stuff we have up here so that it will not be quite so much stuff comes the time when we have to move ourselves entirely back to the U.S., it was a nice way to clean up all the dye materials and make them smaller.

First I decided simply to use up all the dye I had stored in the refrigerator.  Well brought up in the depression, I am inclined to parsimony.  If the dye book says use 1 teaspoon dye for a yard of fabric, I’m inclined to think that a half-teaspoon will probably work just as well, and a quarter teaspoon won’t be entirely out of line.  But having as an object to use up the dye, I was obliged to throw parsimony to the winds.  As a result, I was just pouring concentrated dye straight from the bottle onto wet cloth. 

And what did I learn from this?  If you use more concentrated dye, you get more color.  And since more color is a good thing when one is dyeing (nothing so disappointing as going to the effort and having a bunch of pastel production), I may have to do away with the parsimony principle entirely should we ever have another summer as warm as this one.