Dye Dogs-No Rules- Hitting Them Out Of The Park

I have two special BFFs who love to work with fabrics and all that that entails as much as I do.
About a month ago after a chance remark by one of them I gave each one of them half of a Dye Dog.

Robbie took this picture of hers before she did anything to it. She said the colors weren’t true but you can see the pattern in it. Beth’s had a similar pattern but more subtle. I cut them both from one piece of fabric.

What a fantastic composition Beth did using her Dye Dog as the background. It is so lovely and tasteful.

This is a close-up of Beth’s piece. It you look closely you can see the rosy colored areas that were part of the manipulating when I dyed it.

This is Robbie’s Dye Dog. She loves handwork and comes up with so many unique ways to use it. The addition of the yellow really took this to a new level. If you look closely you also can see the original marks from how I manipulated this fabric.

It’s fun to see two totally different compositions which started with such similar pieces from one of my Dye Dogs. It is obvious they both put a lot of thought, design skills and construction details in their pieces.
I feel like a proud mother since they used my original Dye Dog fabric.

Red Magic

I did shibori dyeing over some dye dogs and got some amazing new pieces to work with.

Over twenty years ago I painted this with thickened dyes. I was surprised how the red dye really made this come to life.


This is the before.
This was a green piece with some glue resist I believe. I was not expecting results as wonderful as I received with the red dye.
The photo below is the before picture.


This piece was given to me and it had been painted. The red really made it sing.

Four of us got together and carved our own printing blocks and then a few days later we got together and printed with them.
Since these were test pieces I didn’t use wonderful fabrics to print on. The red dye definitely brought this up enough notches that it is now something I will use in a composition.
There will be more to come in the future sharing my results as there were 20 pieces in the bucket.

Who Loves Red?

All of these fabrics were Dye Dogs before they all met in the same pot of red dye.
On a future post I’ll share some close-ups of some of them. I am in love.
For now this is a teaser showing parts of a lot of them.
I’m very tempted to just put them all together as if I were putting a jig saw puzzle together as they look so great together.
It’s really hard to pick ONE favorite from this batch.
There are even a few more that are trying to play with each other on the design wall at this time.

I Found It

Someone asked me what my favorite piece from my Olympic dyeing looked like before this last shibori dyeing.
My photos are all over the place on my computer and it can take hours to find a particular photo.
I found it as I was scrolling through one of my ways to find photos…must have been well over 5000 there.

This is the before: it is silk noil that has been painted and then shibori dyed once. I was not happy with it.

This is the after. I love it and it was one of my most successful pieces in the batch of fabrics I dyed.
Almost everything I have been (or will be soon) shibori dyeing recently started as Dye Dogs. I am finding the complexity of layers of pattern are creating fabrics that are so much more interesting than the results when I start with plain white fabric.
I can’t wait to see the next batches. Just need to wrap some more poles to fill the buckets.