Overdyeing effects with Procion MX

I love overdyeing. It takes pretty to popping, adding in a multitude of subtlety and interest,  and sometimes surprises! I've been doing some silk dyeing, thanks to a class with Candy Glendening. Highly recommend her classes. She's very thorough, gives you great spreadsheets to simplify the calculations, and is very responsive to queries and comments. 30% off special going on now!

I tried a class with Elizabeth Barton at the online Academy of Quilting, but the classes don't stay online. It's so many weeks, and then it's taken down. I don't always get to a class immediately. I think it's one of the great bonuses of the internet that information stays available. Craftsy and the like have spoiled us rotten. I enjoyed Elizabeth's class, but I won't be doing any more with Academy of Quilting unless they change their access policies. Candy's classes remain available on an ongoing basis, another point in her favor!

I dyed the silk with some trepidation. Procion MX dyeing is not a kindly, gentle process. There are chemicals, pressure and heat, but the silk came out just fine. The first dye bath was ok, but not fabulous. Overdyeing added the nuance. I'm quite pleased with these now. 

The downside of silk is that it is very hard to photograph, and shows up what a rotten ironer I am!

This is Habotai silk. I haven't used it before, and I'm not sure I will again. It's not my idea of silk, being very thin and not silky feeling at all. I used a very delicate range of colors, and you can see that the colors blended nicely. Not sure what I will do with this, I have 3 fat quarters all the same. They will go in the TBD pile (which teeters precariously..)

Here the gray plays nicely with the shocking pink, toning it down and making it more interesting. Good for a Monday morning in my boring day job I think! This and all the rest are charmeuse - more my idea of silk! High sheen and lovely drape. 

 Here's what I mean by a surprise. The blue was the original color, but it was a bit dull, so I added some plummy accents, using up some older mixture of dye that was in the back of the dye fridge. Clearly it wasn't a pink/blue plum, but one that had originally been a red, so some of the yellow split off during batching. It adds an interesting, if somewhat unexpected pop of brightness.

This was dyed to make silk flowers. The colors are much brighter than they show here, and the colors blend into one another nicely. I may just overdye this some more. Not a fan of white spaces.

The copper really shines with the turquoise. Pity about the ambient light effects. I need to find a photography class!

This is one of my favorites. It was accordion pleated and then lots of different colors introduced at intervals. Some lovely combinations resulted.

This was the more sane of my recent overdyeing projects. More to follow.