Ha-ha! When I posted the update with the pictures of the finished authors’ copies of Remember How to Smile, I joked that I wasn’t going to finish dyeing all of the fabric for the thirty-seven (I was wrong, it’s actually thirty-six) covers for the Mellon Chronicles until 2022.
I’ll be real honest. It felt like that. I’d say that under normal circumstances it wouldn’t get done... but I don’t actually live under normal circumstances like ever. I work at home always. So. This was just perseverance, and, okay, a lot of my real, actual work events being cancelled so I do have a bit more flexibility in what I work on these days, and a lot of thoughts I really want to boil in a pot. Haha. Ha. 2020.
Check this out! So, we’re looking at thirty-six pieces of fabric from ikea, here. I dripped on the fully dark one right before I took the pictures, don’t worry, it doesn’t have spots. And it was a journey to get them all done, you bet. I absolutely almost gave up. These books were almost completely undyed. They were almost completely dyed. The one thing they were not, was going to be this, that was for sure.
I did test strips, and my original preferred results... were not going to happen. I do not have the skill level, or time commitment to acquire it. Okay, I got over myself. I continued.
More test strips revealed... my preferred application methods, which did NOT involve me individually wetting each piece of fabric in its entirety, and then suspending it partially submerged in a crockpot of simmering dye, no thank you, were not viable. Cool cool cool.Â
I rinsed some of my test strips. The dye mostly rinsed out. MotherFU-- I ironed the remaining test strips. Ungrateful little wretches, but they mostly stayed dark brown.Â
I think I sat on the floor with that information for an hour, just staring at them, aware of how annoying this process had gotten. Aware I could back out of it. This was the point. I had consumed no major materials. Posted the plan nowhere, only babbled it on twitch.
I continued. On to the big test, which revealed that building a rig to clip the fabric into would be pointless. My pieces weren’t uniform enough in width, and I had no way to compensate for the curve of the pot except manually. There was a lot of youtube and monotony in my future.
And then despite everything, the first dye pass didn’t hold right when rinsed, so I had to do it twice.Â
I didn’t time it. It would have been difficult to if I’d wanted to. I think I originally held each piece in for the count of forty, and extended that to sixty in the second dye bath. I set my crockpot to “high” while dyeing, and “warm” when it wasn’t. I think it was running for a total of two weeks. My black walnut husks are dryed, probably around five years old, and stored in a paper bag.
The dye bath itself is made from a dye I’ve kept in a jar for over a year. Some people keep sourdough starters, I keep dyes; when I used it this time I added a bra laundry bag worth of husks to the start, cooked that for a day before the tests, then pulled the laundry bag of husks out, squeezed it out, and started going. I did that again between dye bath 1 and dye bath 2. I’d intermittently add water as needed. At the end the remaining dye was poured, still extremely hot, back into its re-sterilized jar until overflowing, then I popped the lid on. If it molds, it gets dumped, but otherwise we chat.
After the fabric was dyed the second time, it waited about a month to get ironed really, really well, and then rinsed. I didn’t want to know if there would be a dye bath 3. But there won’t! Next, we’re on to the ironing (again), though much lighter this time.
Then it’s finally designing the cover embroidery, which will be reasonable. No getting carried away with that many covers, but you still want it to be recognizable. And a LOT of rice paste to turn this into book cloth. A L O T. 2022. No, really. Bet ya money.
Want to see me make more work like this? So do I!
