I'm going to do several posts for this one so you can see all the before and after's on the overdying. It would overload with photos if I tried to do it all at once.
First, the rust-dyed fabric. I had problems finding stuff that would actually rust, but got a few washers to do the trick when I soaked the whole thing in vinegar.
I decided to use a blue-green dye bath, going with the idea of complementary colors. And since the original had a clear fold line going through it, I counterbalanced that by just scrunching the second time. It didn't work out quite the way I'd hoped--I wanted a little more muddy effect. I may dye this one a third time to see if I can get something a little more subtle.
Rust-dyed "Before"
Rust-dyed "After"
Next, I tackled a single-colored "before." This one was dyed straight up with blue. It's a fairly dark blue and takes well to fabric. Although I liked the blue well enough, I wanted to see if I could make it just a little more interesting so I overdyed it with green. Since the original blue had just been scrunched into the dye bath, I decided to use rubber bands to create rings. I was hoping for a nice dark blue ring peeking out from the green overdye. Can't see the rings, but I still like the finished product quite a bit.
Blue "Before" (Apologies for the yellow cast, bad lighting)
Blue-green "After"
Another single color "before" was a very nice green one. I debated whether I wanted to overdye this one for awhile because it was such a nice green. But hey, I own the dyes. I can always make another! So off to experiment I went. I decided to overdye this one with straight yellow. The first version was just scrunched, so on the second I used rubber bands to make concentric rings hoping to make a more distinct design.
Green "Before"
Yellow-green "After"
Love that one. The green isn't as faded as it looks in that picture--it's actually a bit ore of a subtle effect between the green and yellow. But I love the yellow rays. Totally unexpected, very cool.
Now we turn to one I wasn't keen on at the start and I'm not sure overdying helped it much. It has a little bit more of a coolness factor now, but not quite enough for me. This is one of the tone-on-tones, if you recall those from round 1. The first round was a pleat-fold and dyed in green, so I did a perpendicular pleat-fold in yellow to see if I could get a grid effect.
Green "before" (tone on tone shown)
Green and yellow grid "after"
One more set for this post. Here was a long strip of fabric on which I did a triangle (flag) fold the first time and dyed it turquoise. It's the perfect shape to try stacking. Stacking is when you "stack" dye colors on top of one another. You crunch the bottom of the fabric into a container with one color, then you stuff a bunch more of the fabric in and add a second color, and stuff more fabric in and add a third, going on for as many colors as you can fit in your container. It works because each section of fabric largely soaks up the dye in that section. There's merging between sections as well, which is where some very funky stuff can happen.
I stacked mine starting with green dye on the bottom, stuffed as much down as I could, then stuffed the rest in and added yellow dye. I don't think I had enough fabric to really soak up the dyes in each section because it all came out a fairly uniform yellow-green. Pretty, but not the effect I was going for.
Turquoise "before"
Stacked "After"
Stay tuned...