Making Purple and Red

I had a little bit of a setback last week with some of my dyeing. I ran out of my red hand-dyed bamboo fabric so I thought I'd dye some more. I already had a Turkish Red dye bath set up from my dyeing three weeks before so I thought I could use it. Look what happened, this was supposed to turn out like the 2nd photo did.

I've always done my dyeing with FR-H dyes & I guess I've been lucky with the shelf life of those dyes. The problem with FR-H dyes, steaming is required to set the dyes & since I don't have a steamer, it makes things a little difficult. I joined DyeHard_RunOff to learn how to use MX dyes since those dyes don't require steaming. I had no idea that the shelf life of MX dye baths is quite short. So now my dye baths are a lot smaller as to not waste any & I'm learning to dye other things with the left over colors. (The last photo is the left overs of when I did my Make Purple Run.) I have no idea how I got the blue dots on the piece since the piece was scrunched up & twisted upon itself, but I thought it turned out pretty nice.

This was my "Make Purple" run for DyeHard_RunOff. As you can see, it didn't work very well. I used Turkish Red & Full Navy from ProChem. The navy was definitely overpowering & you can't really see much purple. Last nite I tried another run at this & increased my red dye concentrate. I will post pics tomorrow so you can see if there is any difference (I sure hope there is.)