The New, Millennium Edition of
"Color Wheel Fabric Dyeing"
by Katy Widger ©2000
There is a certain magic to dyeing your own fabric. It's exciting to watch a batch of un-colored fabric take on beautiful, unusual hues and to achieve subtle color and value gradations that are unavailable commercially. The satisfaction obtained from producing your own fabric is further enhanced by the opportunity to control every aspect of the creative process involved in making quilts.
Acquiring the knowledge to manipulate these easy-to-use dyes on fabric will give you a freedom and confidence to express yourself through color in a very personal way. This workbook explores several different ways of achieving unique color and value combinations, as well as dyeing specific individual colors. As an art quilter who dyes her own fabric, I have written this book for those who wish to take control of the color in their life. This greatly expanded, revised, and updated edition now includes new information on mottled and solid dyeing of both cotton and silk. There is so much new material that I had to completely restructure the book to give you the benefit of the last 10 years since the original book's first publication!
Controlling Procion MX© dyes on cotton fabric is fun and easy, but, as with the craft of quiltmaking, it requires knowledge and practice to develop the necessary skills. The new edition of my book includes information to help you understand why dyes act the way they do, and how to control them to your satisfaction.
Precision and consistency are the two key ingredients to successful dyeing, just as precise cutting and sewing are vital elements in constructing a beautiful quilt. Accuracy in measuring ingredients as well as consistently following a standard dye formula will yield repeatable results. Keeping accurate records of your procedures and the colors you obtained is vital if you wish to establish your own "recipe book" of color formulas for future reference. By keeping accurate records of both successes and "aberrations" you will be able to develop future dye recipes, modify existing ones to accommodate present needs and avoid repeating those inevitable mistakes we all make. It is through these unexpected results that I have developed new procedures and formulas or modified existing ones to produce exciting and beautiful new fabrics.
The system of dyeing that I have come to use allows me to create beautiful color gradations with repeatable and predictable results using a minimum of original dye colors. It is not necessary to purchase a particular dye for each color you wish to dye when you know a little about color theory and color mixing. It is possible to produce color gradations that range from light to dark, bright to dark, around the color wheel or across the color wheel in an array of brilliant hues or subdued neutrals that are guaranteed to be unlike any fabric colors you have ever seen. These types of color gradations are designed to reflect the color combinations found in nature. The pale turquoise to deep navy of a twilight sky, the coral blush to deep indigo of a sunset, the reddish browns to hunter greens found in the earth can all be reproduced in fabric using Procion dyes, these procedures, and practice.
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