As I would say on a gaming forum /blush (the / denotes an action). Thanks for the nice comments. Susie, I'd love to see pictures of the scarf. My mom who does watercolor paintings did some lovely work with silk scarves and a particular type of ink.
The thing is that home dying can be done by any of us, often with only the things we have on hand. Everything else pretty much can be bought at a 24-hour Walmart! Look for the tie dye section in the craft aisle. So if you have a dark piece scrap leftover, maybe think to yourself -- I wonder what would happen if I made a paste of my sink scrubber (the type that already includes bleach, you don't want to mess much with bleach unless you know what you are messing with), and brushed it on with a toothbrush... You start with wet fabric, btw, and check it about every 15 minutes in case there is a fast reaction and just let it dry if there isn't. Nice thing with bleach processes is all you have to do is rinse it out, no need to set! Or you have a floral that's just a bit too pale or too bright, well, most of us have a microwave and a few tea bags around.
When you dye your own fabrics, you know what you used and therefore you know how to set it. I didn't know with this bag, I was really surprised by how much the dye ran when the pieces had been starched. /boggle!
I'm sure some of it is rayon especially the binding, I don't stress about it if I can't tell for certain by my usual tests. Years ago I made a quilt out of clothing scraps, one of those was a bright piece of beautiful rayon sun dress and it held up better than some of the "new" cottons. But the thing is the processes/chemicals used for rayon and cotton are different.
Since I didn't know what was done, most of what I've really been doing is heat setting a stain and removing the excess dye. But yeah -- if I hadn't been stuck in the house without a working car, I would never have managed my way through this full bag. At one point my hubby asked me, so are you still going to do that easter egg boiling some more or have you "gotten everything you wanted out of that project" yet? (It's so cute when they use your own phrases against you!) Unfortunately for him, although I had everything I needed for Frolic I was only half way through the bag.
The bag originally was $7.99 at the thrift store, I paid full price for it. I've spent approximately $40 on supplies, including red and yellow dyes, but mostly setting fixatives and vinegar, didn't add in the cost for the plastic wrap. I'd say I put in a good 40 hour work week on it, which included multiple loads of laundry and gallons of water. Don't know what it sells for and I'm not selling this, but I'm putting "my" cost on this at about $20/yard. Surely a trip to the store would have been cheaper and less time/resource intensive.