Can You Bear To Experiment With One-of-a Kind Fabrics?

     Have you ever had special fabrics that you were afraid to cut up or paint onto or add other surface designs and possibly ruin them? Well, I dyed several fabrics to prepare for my next session in my Art Cloth Mastery Class with Jane Dunewold. The supply list for this session said to bring 6-8 pieces of at least 1/2 yard pieces of hand-dyed fabrics that didn't work out and maybe some you even liked. We are going to be over-dyeing and discharging among other things this session. Since, I haven't been a fabric dyer, I didn't have any pieces of dyed fabric just laying around so I had to freshly dye all mine.
     As it turned out, I ended up liking all but one. I kept notes on how I made each piece and was surprised that I got different colors from the same mixed dye in the same jar of chemical water simply by how I poured it on the scrumbled cloth. I'll have to experiment with that some more in the future. Here are my fabrics that will be sacrificed next week with further experiments in Jane's studio in Texas.

cotton fabrics hanging on my design wall

I applied various manipulations to them so that I would have a variety of things to look at and consider when I discharge and over dye. And I used both pure dyes and mixed dyes to see how they would react when over dyed and discharged. We also have to take 5 yards of white fabric to dye and over dye. I think my dye notebook is going to get a lot thicker by the end of the seven days. 

     Looking at those lovely fabrics, I want to cut them and sew them together and make them into a scarf and boro stitch it, or make them into a cover for my iPad or a purse. I hate to change the actual fabrics. But, alas, their fate is going to be for research and that is that.  I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.