Monday, April 18, 2011

Fun With Color

The faire season is fast approaching and I am scraping the bottom of the fabric stash and doing whatever I can to make our garb work. This week that has included experimenting with dying and fading the fabric I have that is an appropriate weigh for garb but the colors were just a little off. I also redyed a shirt of Riley's to make it a nice saffron with curry powder. I did this because it was a dingy white that looked sloppy and gray with a few stains and because his persona is a gitano (Spanish Romani) and sloppy white is not a bright color.
Not as even of tone as I would like but not awful. Click for full size.



The other experiment was with bleaching some purple quilting cotton to a tone that at least looked like it could have been achieved with period dyes because the original color was fairly neon. After several hours of feeling sure that the threads were going to disintegrate before the dye did I finally rinsed it out and let it drip dry and left for the weekend. When I came home I discovered how dramatic of a change actually occurred.

Bleached on the left original on the right for comparison.
Now I just need to hope my iron works long enough for me to get those wrinkles out!
I like the result and it totally looks even better in person. The fading really brought out the texture of the cloth and made it seem a lot more earthy. It has a much more period feel to it now. It will hopefully make an amazing shirt with wonderfully garish puffy sleeves. At last my gypsy love will be wearing appropriately bright colors that are not red. I am also trying, rather futilely to darken the tone of a brown polyester cotton blend to make it seem a little less shiny and industrial. I'm hoping a couple more trips will fix it up.

So that's what I've been up to, that and job searching.

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