Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Twill Samples Arrive

Minutes after I placed an order for some twill online, I went down to my mail box only to find that I did INDEED already order the stuff. oy.



I opened up the package, and I have to say, I was a little confused to find this:



A VERY odd assortment of colors. I thought I ordered a bunch of reds? These are all pretty weird looking, and one of them isn't even a twill. And my invoice shows that I ordered a yard of white. Please tell me which one of these is white???

So the real tragedy here is that I have no idea which fabric is which. So on the off chance i really loved the the one in the upper right, I have no way of identifying it.

Since all of the fabrics I ordered were of varying bolt widths on the website, I thought I would be smart about it and simply measure the fabrics to determine which was which. No such luck, as NONE of the lenghts matched what was on the website. Bummer



But since I had all the fabrics handy, I figured I would do some dye tests. I still need to know if it is possible to turn one of these into the color I eventually want. So I cut some swatches and gave them all a dye bath.



Holy crap, they actually ALL turned out really well. The red swatches you see on top show the new color, while the fabric under them is the original color. Quite a striking difference in most cases.



I ended up cutting those dyed swatches in half, and am double dunking them in dye just to see how deep I can get the red to go. Overall I'm really impressed and quite happy with the results. I now have a few different options for twills I can use for the inner shell of the cape, and that makes me happy.

I emailed the fabric company and kindly asked them to please label the fabric they send out this time. Sheesh.

2 comments:

sabina said...

Did you use a scarlet and wine mix to get those deep red color swatches in the final photo?

MattMunson said...

I ended up ONLY using the Scarlet. The wine was a little too purple for my tastes.