Saturday, February 27, 2010

Ombre Testing

I was in the middle of cleaning up my home office when I got a bug to take another stab at the ombre dying. I cut up a strip of fabric, and actually mixed up a bucket of of Rit's "Wine" colored dye. The plan was not only to do a couple more test dyes of the stabilization flap, but also to play around with the ombre. The one I did last time was nice, but didn't quite give me the right color I was going for.

Here's the dye I am using.



And here's how it turned out!



Though the fabric is still a TINY bit damp at this point, it is essentialy PERFECT. The color on the dark end of the fabric is REALLY nice, and turned out great. It's just the right color that I wanted it to be. In the final piece, the ombre will run a little farther into the length of the fabric, but this was just really proof of concept.

I'm very happy with the results so far.

Anothing thing I've learned lately is that getting good results from dye is really NOT that hard. I think it might be tough if you're trying to color match pefectly, but getting a nice color evenly across your fabric is not that hard.

The reason this is interesting to me is because it gets me rethinking my fabric strategy. Point one is that the dry cleaner did NOT manage to get the crease out of the fabric I took in. It's ALMOST gone, but it's still there. That got me thinking that I might want to re-assess my choice of fabric. But that's a giant pain, and the stuff I have is REALLY darn good. But if I'm not limited to off the bolt RED fabric, but can also look for whites, that might really open things up for me. I think I might take another stab at finding a better match for the fabric in a wide bolt size, but this time go for white, then just dye it to the color I want.

No comments: