While the thread is drying on the trays, I dye cotton fabric for quilt making. It’s a way to use up the leftover dye and a way to play with color creating some new color schemes I call “random acts of dyeing”.

If you’ve ever purchased something from the Artfabrik store and received a quarter yard of fabric as a gift, you’ve received a “random act of dyeing”.

The next day the fabric is washed out in my trusty top-loading washing machine. As the water is pumped out of the washer, I collect it in small buckets like this. This water is used to wash the thread. Hand washing the thread can take up to 22 buckets of water for a dark colorway. Days of hoisting buckets of water have given me arms of steel!

While the white thread is soaking in a bucket of soda ash water (the fixative for Procion MX dyes), I prepare dye sequences for several colorways. Sometimes I use the dye straight out of the dye stock bottle. And sometimes, I cut the dye with water to make lighter values of the dye color.

There are over 60 colorways of threads stocked in the Artfabrik store. Each thread colorway has a formula or sequence of colors that have to be prepared ahead of painting the skeins.