Fabric to Dye For

One of the things that I think is so important when you are starting to dye is to keep a notebook. It is something I didn’t do right away and wish I had, and even now sometimes I forget to write in my notebook, but it is so important when you start playing around with different color combinations that you write down what you did or you will never remember the exact combination of colors that you put together and if you want to reproduce that color you will need to refer to your notes. This is something that the science world does very well and the art world is not as good at. It is something that we need to do as artist as well. Journal about your art, write yourself notes. Remind yourself of your successes and your failures. Journal about the art you are making, where the inspiration came from, keep pictures in your journal if you take digitals, or sketches next to the final picture of the work. When I was in art classes one of our first assignments was to keep a notebook with inspiration pictures. Where ever you find pictures that you like cut them out if you can, magazines, newspapers, print digital images off of the internet and put them in Design Idea notebooks, I have lots of these. I just keep filing them up. When I am stuck or uninspired I can pull them out and look through them and before I know it I am off and running with a new idea.

Dye notebook

Pages from Idea book – sketches