Dyeing Embroidery Floss

When I dyed my fabric, I also dyed some embroidery floss for use in hand stitching.  For a few years, I have been using Melanie Testa's technique as explained in her Inspired to Quilt book.  This time I decided to do it a little bit differently.

Recently, in one of the Quilting Arts magazines,  Testa wrote an article with Carol Soderlund about dyeing floss.  I decided to try Soderlund's approach in conjunction with Testa's approach.  I dyed some solid colors to match the fabrics (but not all of them) and some variegated.

Here are the solid colors.

And here are the variegated.  A few are very subtle.

With Soderlund's approach, you place a hank of floss on top of a piece of fabric when dyeing.  I believe the thinking behind that is that the fabric absorbs the extra dye so the floss is not sitting in a puddle of dye where the colors could be become all muddy.  And you also have a dyed piece of fabric.  It's like two for one.

I used some small pieces of fabric I had.  Some were already a color, some were not.  This is what those fabrics look like.

I'm not sure what I will do with them but they are interesting.  I liked my combo approach to dyeing the floss this year.