Fiber Artist Journey: More Procion MX Dyeing

Wow... another fantastic day of mostly working with Procion MX dyeing at the Gail Harker Center for Creative Studies. To be completely honest, I'm pretty tired... this can be hard work. So, I'm going to keep it short and sweet tonight, and just put up some images and descriptions of the processes and projects we worked on.

First, our hand-dyed embroidery threads are totally luscious! Here they are drying in our classroom. We had to rinse them out and then set the color in hot water with Synthropol today.

We then started dyeing wool-rayon felt, which we'd cut into pieces prior to class, and will be making into hand-stitched books.

Felt with dye poured on (wet)

The felt totally soaks up the dye... you have to pour it on and it looks horrible and dark for the most part.

Rinsing out the felt

After allowing it to sit for a few hours, we rinsed it out and also set the dye with Synthropol. Since the felt soaks up so much water, we had to carefully wrap it in towels to help dry it. You don't want to press or agitate it very much, or it starts the felting process. We then left it to completely dry overnight.

Felt dyeing

Rinsed felt for hand-made stitch books, laid out to dry

We also worked with painting dyes on sketchbook pages. We do these in 2-page "spreads" so that they will go together when the book is opened. We then fuse pages together, to make the pages stiff and able to be stitched on. We started working on a few pages by drawing a design on them, then punching holes through the paper with a darning needle. We then can easily put our stitches through the holes.