DIY Fabric Colors

Recently I ordered a LOT of Dye-na-Flow fabric paint from Dharma Trading Co. https://www.dharmatrading.com/ Now that I have the quilting bug, I want to create my own fabrics. I know, there are thousands of beautiful quilt fabrics out there in retail world. But most of them are just not for me. And the ones I do like are kinda pricey. So here I go, making my own.

I had purchased several yards of white and light gray solid fabric specifically for coloring. I have an idea for designing a sunset scene. So today I am coloring the white fabric with warm colors such as yellow, orange, gold, and pink. Here is my swatch fabric where I tested a few combinations.

There’s also a little bit of ecru in the mix.

I plan to use 4 inch strips in my project, so I cut the fabric into 13″ wide pieces. This will yield three strips per piece, and incidentally, be a workable size for painting. Here are the results of today’s work:

Stripes of sunset colors. The orangey stripe should fall into the center of the 4 inch strip.

This gold turned out very well. I added some orange stripes and splatters. The stripe will go across the strips.

This was the tail end piece. It may be enough for one strip. It looks a bit blue in this photo, but I assure you that it dried pale pink.

It was a relaxing and productive afternoon. I look forward to working on the gray fabric. It will be interesting to see how it reacts to the sheer fabric paint.

Salty Squares

Rain, rain rain. It just doesn’t want to stop. So today I decided to stay indoors and play with my Dye-Na-Flo paints again. The goal is to color up some fabric that can be sewn into a nine-patch quilt square. Thinking about the design principals of using light, medium and dark colors to create good design, I chose pink, orange and white for one swatch, and pink, purple and black for the other swatch. I will use the salt technique on top of the color washes. Salt has the effect of moving the pigments around in the drying phase. So here are my before and after photographs:

Light colors after painting, with rock salt sprinkled on top.

Light swatch after drying, salt removed.

Dark swatch after painting. I used broad stripes, then moved the paint side-to-side before sprinkling with the rock salt.

Dark swatch after drying.

Due to the damp weather, it took all afternoon and the application of a little blow-dryer heat to get the fabric dry. But what interesting results have happened!

Next time, I cut the patches and sew.