The Potential of Tray Dyeing
Tray Dyeing is one of the oldest techniques in my dyeing experience. Claire and I both feel strongly that in order to understand any process, you have to engage with it at length in order to fully understand its potential. As such, I’ve tray-dyed thousands of yards of cloth – possibly miles (image 1) and my conclusions about it are:
- It’s not as easy as it looks, but the combination of the book and the DVD will help you to get to grips with it. And practise is important – by practising and engaging with the process anyone can learn to control the results.
- The process teaches a great deal about colour mixing and colour relationships – almost more than any other process I can think of.
- It can be a ‘hole-in-one’ process in the sense that great results can be achieved after one hit.
- It’s great for generating cloth with fantastic texture, either organic in nature (image 2), ‘crunchy’ (image 3) or… structural, directional and linear (image 4)
- The colour possibilities are endless – from simple, moody monochromatic shades (image 5) to bright, zingy, multi-coloured combinations (image 6)
- It makes for fabulous backgrounds. Admittedly, these can be ‘pushy’ but if handled sensitively, tray-dyed backgrounds can be worked up and turned into layered, compositional cloth (images 6 & 7)
- It creates a valuable addition to a palette of cloth for making pieced quilts (images 8 to 11).
- It can make fabulous garment yardage.
I used tray-dyed cloth as part of my palette in a series of quilts called ‘New Life Rising’ (images 12 & 13). Immediately after, I used a more restricted colour palette to set the mood for Lost Light – still my favourite quilt (images 14 & 15).
And on a final note, when you’re mixing the dyes to use in the tray, you’ll inevitably mix too much. Don’t worry about this! Image 16 shows the fantastic results that can be achieved by using the left-overs (fully explained on page 37 of the book).
