Minimalism NES Style, Rit Dye Goes Very Wrong (u2)

Since the duck canvas wasn't working and the painted canvas wasn't working, I decided to try a bit a fabric dye. My tombstone will be etched with "It can't be that hard". I thought it would be pretty easy to dye something a flat color. Should have done my research first!

Here's my results...

Firstly, I prepared the linen by cutting it to size and putting overlock stitches around the edges to prevent fraying. I also cut myself some test strips to try the dye before I committed on the finished pieces.

I wanted to make sure I marked the area that the canvas was going to fit into before I dyed the fabric. I needed to use a method that could be removed. Since I dont love washable fabric markers, I went with basting in some stitches.

I mixed the dye following the instructions for the bucket methods and tried my strips using different dye times. I was pretty quickly disappointed with the results even though the gradient effect is kind of cool.

The second to the top strip show just about every color spot of the rainbow, well, at least blue, red, and yellow. Guess that is how you make black dye - throw in all the colors! I never got black though, just a really dark purple and in the case of the 'greys', really light purple. I decided it was what I had and I was going to go with it and hope for the best.

Per the product instructions, I wet the fabric

Stirred it in the dye bath for 10 minutes, rinsed the fabrics

and then dried.

Lots of purple. The upside is that it is totally ok for the project and much better than the painted version. I did do a little bit of research and it didn't take long to learn that Rit dye does not do well with the "bucket method" (requires much hotter water) and as a bonus, doesnt do well with black. Looks like if I try this again, I'll have to do some studying!