Disaster struck when I wasn’t looking this morning. I finished my dark green button through skirt [as per previous post] and was very happy with it. I wore it to a social evening last night and this morning decided to rinse it through. I washed it by hand as I didn’t know how colour fast the green was, and it did bleed quite a bit of colour but didn’t fade any. Then I quite forgot that I had cleaned the draining board with a bleach solution and put it straight from the sink onto it! The bleach lifted the colour from the front left hand panel in little streaks. So I decided that this was as good a time to try my hand at dyeing. I had some dye already made up from when I was dyeing the roving was spinning. I had some dark blue, turquoise and greeny/gold and I put the turquoise and dark blue together in a big pan with a little white vinegar and brought it to the boil and let it simmer for nearly 30 minutes. This didn’t seem to alter the general colour but it did overdye the bleached streaks a bit and made them less noticeable. I clearly need some dark green to have another go.

As I already had the dye pot out, I decided to experiment with some of my blue and white fabrics. I chose three different pieces and dyed them first in the blue, not leaving them in too long as I wanted the blue florals to show through. Then I tried a piece with the greeny/gold, this came out almost lime green. Then I did three pieces in tea. The results and comments are below.

#1 Blue                                           #2 Green/gold                          #3 Tea

Then I decided to cut the lime green piece [centre above] and overdye with both the blue and the tea to see what resulted; it was this:-

Of the blues I prefer this fabric, I also like     the tea dye, but opted to dye the whole piece blue.

For the rest, I preferred the tea dye; what do you think? click on the pictures for a clearer view.