My lovely hand dyed fabric pile

My lovely pile of hand dyed fabrics!

This year I’ve experimented with the idea of “making the material my own” more than ever before. I love the idea of dying and not just using store bought and ready to go materials. In a class I took we experimented with these fun fabric colours, called Omeaga Dyrect, and dyed cotton fabric and some embroidery floss too.

All you need with these is heat and salt. They can be used in a pan, microwave or washing machine. They dye comes as a powder that you sprinkle on top of the fabric. Crumble the fabric and leave the powder without mixing it in the water, and you can get fun colouring effects with darker spots.

When you get into dipping pieces of cloth into coloured water you don’t want to stop. We all got into a kind of frenzy to try another bath, to do a few more examples. I wish I’d had more white thread with me, because dying your own embroidery floss is super fun I found out. You can dip the thread in different colours and make it multi coloured, my favorite kind to sew with. But I hope I can experiment with this more in the future.

We also had time to do some painting, printing and stamping using fabric paint. The colours weren’t very fun – at least not compared to acrylics that I’ve used before, but it doesn’t harden the fabric like acrylics tend to. And I did a few experiments, that I might be able to create something fun with in the future.

This is how the painted fabric turned out.

Here are a few examples of the dyed fabrics I made:

The pile of hand dyed fabric just makes me happy! It is now ironed and ready to be used in some embroidery mixed media project.