SherylM

Well, there's no shortage of information out there and I found much of it not helpful, because I needed to do something specific. I needed 5 or 6 gradations of 6 different colors, but I found some of the instructions for how to do that confusing and incomplete.

My daughter picked out the colors she wanted - I used Procion MX dyes that I bought from Pro Chemical and Dye and I finally found a book on Amazon that gave me the specific information that I needed. It's called Hand-Dyed Fabric Made Easy by Adriene Buffington (I bought a used copy...the new ones are $$$.) I used the "Light to Dark Family" project and the plastic bag method (each piece of fabric goes into a ziploc bag with the dye solution and gets sealed), which was a Godsend.

One of the things I was worried about was the mess, because we're in a rental condo and I was afraid I would get dye everywhere. One of the nice things about the Procion dyes is that they only dye natural fibers, like cotton and wool, so it wiped right off of my white formica countertops and you can't even tell that there was dye in my washer and bathtub.

It was a very easy and fun process and the only part of it that was frustrating was getting all of the excess dye rinsed out, especially the red and blue dyes. It took for.ev.er! I had a lot of fabric to process (about 40 fat quarters - I made more than I needed), so that's a lot of rinsing and a lot of water. If you live in a part of the country where there are water shortages, you need to deal with that.

I really enjoyed the process and loved the results that I got, and can honestly say that I'm hooked! the next dye project that I tackle will be shibori - the Japanese method of tie-dyeing.

It can be intimidating, but it's really not hard. Just don't do a first project with 10 yards of fabric like I did!