It has literally been years since I have dyed any fabric. My studio has been dis-assembled and my projects have been limping along using whatever energy I can scrounge from daily life, but little by little Lisa's project has been taking shape. I have all the tablecloths finished and am now pulling together the accessories....centerpieces, napkins, etc. It always surprises me how much time and effort this part takes, but I have come down to one last hurdle...the napkins for Lisa's autumn table. All of the table linens I make are washable but I prefer to use commercially dyed linen for napkins because they always bear the brunt of heavy use at the table and must endure lots of time in the laundry. This time though, I just couldn't find the right color. It took a while to even decide what color I was looking for. The autumn runner I made has gold, red-peach, and purple gray elements.
I had to set up the whole table with dishes, centerpiece and glassware to figure out what accent color would blend cohesively with the table as a whole. I finally settled on Parisian gray, which is a very gray lavender, but then could not find anything that wasn't too red, too blue, too bright, or too dark. I realized that I would just have to dye it myself, using the same colors I used when I made the runner in the first place. Easier said than done, of course. All of my studio stuff is piled high in one room of the old house. It took awhile to find the dyes themselves, and then I had to assemble the fabric (yay, two yards of lightweight linen were lurking in a tote), the kettle, the stove, the scale, the beakers, the thermometers, and the stirring spoons and sticks. Also gloves, mask, and oops, order more mordant. Finally, I mixed equal amounts of logwood purple and logwood gray and returned to the age-old stance of vigilance, stirring my steaming pot and peering anxiously at the developing color.
It came out okay. The dye is even and the color is good, if a little dark. Whew.