I had a mind to play around with some dyeing at the weekend.
I used Procion dyes in my two favourite colours – Indigo Navy and Mustard.
I used Cotton, Silk Noil, Muslin and Cotton Organdie, wrapped them round with elastic bands and put some in the Mustard dyebath first.
I also dyed some lengths of fabric just in the Indigo Navy at the same time so when I took the wrapped pieces from the Mustard dyebath I rinsed, re-wrapped and transferred them to the almost exhausted Indigo Navy dyebath.
These are some of the resulting pieces of fabric.
I then decided to put some of them together in a panel. Its about a metre high x 60 cms wide.
It doesn’t look too good, I think there is too much going on although it does look different when you see it as a whole rather than a scaled down photo. I really didn’t spend enough time playing around with positioning the fabrics but it isn’t a serious piece – just something I fancied doing.

I also wanted to try out some Thermofax screens I bought from the Committed to Cloth stand at Ally Pally last October.
I could become seriously addicted to this technique :)
It was great fun and I’ll write up another blog posting shortly with some of the other bits I created.
These two prints on this panel were my first attempt and I was very pleased with the way they turned out. It’s such a simple procedure with instant results.
This photo shows a close up of the Muslin in the right hand corner on the panel.
I cut a length from the same piece as that which it sits on and run it through the smocking machine.
Just thought I’d drop this photo in. I cut and pasted this section from the original and thought it had a sort of watercolour painting look about it.
And this vaguely related piece is Cotton Velvet which had been previously dyed Golden Yellow, wrapped with elastic bands and dunked in the Indigo Navy dyebath. I think I’m going to screen print on this piece too. I want to try out screen printing with plexi-glue and then foiling on the top