Parfait

Today I am showing you how to create a parfait or layered dyeing. For this I use a glass vase - easier for the pictures, but of course you can use a container or a bucket as well and 4 fq's of cotton fabric. The fabric was presoaked and labelled with small pieces of Tyvek marked 1 up to 4. First a small container was placed into the vase to create a raised platform.

The first piece of fabric was crunched and place on top of the raised platform.

This was covered with some snow.

Dye powder was sprinkled on it

And this was covered with a bit of snow.

This process was repeated till the vase was full.

The colors I used were:

1- Brazilnut (Dharma)

2- Marigold (Dharma)

3- Watermelon (ProChem)

4- Razzledazzle (Dharma)

The vase was left like this till the next morning. After rinsing, washing and ironing this is how the fabric turned out:

 fabric 1:

fabric 2: 

fabric 3:

fabric 4:

The above fabrics are created with snow. I repeated the whole process with ice cubes using the following dye powders:
1-Robin's Egg Blue (Dharma)
2- Better Blue Green (Dharma)
3- Tangerine (a pure color)
4- Dragon Fruit (Dharma).
And here are the fabrics:

fabric 1:

fabric 2:

fabric 3:

fabric 4:

As you see this technique can be done both with snow or with ice. If I had not marked them, I would not have been able to say which medium I used.

Parfait Dyeing

Posted by Laura McGrath-guest during February--

Lots of fun stuff going on here with Ann Johnston’s DVD Color by Accident this month!  I’m going to show my results with some of her Parfait Dyeing technique.

First, I mixed up all the dye solutions, using the 14 pure colors.  I used 2 cups of water and 3-4 tablespoons of dye powder to each bottle.  (And realized later, after doing a bunch of dyeing, that I forgot to add the 4-8 tablespoons of urea that I was supposed to include—whoops!)

For the parfait dyeing, I wet my fabric pieces that were each about 18” x 44”, and wrung out the excess water.  Then I put one piece in a large jar and scrunched it up really good.  I took a one cup container and put about 4 tablespoons of Intense Blue dye solution in it, then filled with water to have a full cup.  I poured it on the fabric, waited about 5 minutes, then poured in about ½ cup of soda ash/water solution.  Second piece was done the same way, this time using Tangerine dye solution, and adding soda ash again.  For the third piece I used Strong Orange dye concentrate, and again added soda ash, and squished it all down tightly.

Then I waited an hour, and rinsed it all out, and washed in the washing machine.

Here are the finished pieces:

I did this whole process again, the second time using a stronger solution of the same dye concentrates (8 tablespoons dye solution of each color).  I thought I would get a really deeper color, but it didn't make it twice as dark.

Here are the two sets side-by-side--

It surprised me that the Tangerine and Strong Orange colors were pretty much taken over by the blue, creating so much green.  The best part of this process is that it was SO easy! 

Check out more of my Ann Johnston dyeing results on my blog, Periwinkle Art Quilts.

Posting for Parfait Dyeing

Kit Lang sent us her results.  Aren't they spectacular?  If anyone else tried any of the techniques we have shown and wants to show us their results, please do respond in the comments and I'll post the results.

Parfait Dyeing--Quilter Beth

I finally had a chance to try parfait dyeing. I really enjoyed doing it; it was a simple process. I think the outcome would have been more varied if I had used more colors of dye. I just used what I had left over from another dye session—red, a small bit of fuchsia, two blues, and a yellow. The blues were VERY similar. I used two fat quarters of PFD fabric and some of the pieces I had worked on when we did the soy wax resist. ( I just wanted to see what they would look like with this parfait dyeing.)

These are some of the fabrics I started with...

This was a "wipe up" cloth with brush strokes from my dye-mixing brush from my last dye session.

The two fabrics above are from the soy wax resist session. In addition to these, I had two fat quarters of white PFD fabric, a piece of off-white gauze with circles on it, and another piece of soy wax resist fabric.

Here is what they looked like in the containers...

On the left--red/fuchsia and blue; top right--the two blues; bottom right--yellow, red, then blue

I used yellow, red, and a blue for these…

This was the orange, soy wax resist piece. 

This was a fat quarter of PFD fabric. 

This started as off-white gauze with circles.

I used red with the little fuchsia I had, then I added a blue to it for these…

This was the "wipe-up" cloth. 

This was another piece of the soy wax resist fabric.

I used the two blues for these…

This was the green, soy wax resist fabric. 

This began as a fat quarter of white PFD fabric.

I liked doing this, and I like the outcome. I think I'll be doing this again.