I wasn’t happy with how burgundy my Marsala fabric appeared in some lights, so I decided to hit it with some dye.
After some deliberation, I picked Dylon’s dark brown. I only wanted to shift the shade of the fabric a few clicks towards brown, so I only used one sachet despite having slightly more than 250g of fabric to dye.
This plastic bucket was the perfect size to hold both fabric and dye and kept me from making an epic mess of the kitchen sink! In fact, the only thing I managed to unintentionally dye was myself:
When dyeing, it’s important to establish beforehand that your gloves don’t leak!
The packet of dye suggested a total immersion time of an hour, but I decided to remove my fabric after only half an hour because I didn’t want it to be too brown. Then I rinsed it out really well and threw it in the washing machine with a couple of colour catchers (which came out very brown!).
I’m really quite pleased with the final colour; it seems more red-brown now rather than burgundy.
I was disappointed that I didn’t get a textured look at all, but I’m not sure this dye works like that and I did stir the fabric in it pretty well. Anyway, I like this colour and I’m looking forward to seeing it in my blocks. With luck, I should get a chance to get started with cutting and piecing this weekend. After some back-of-envelope calculations, I’ve realised I don’t have enough of this fabric to be able to make the size of quilt I want with the large (24″) blocks, but I should be able to do something good with the small (12″) blocks, or maybe even a combination of the two. That’ll teach me to buy fabric first and do the maths later! (But probably not.)