Untitled, Part 4

Untitled, Part 4

Dyeing Experiments and the Project Interruption by the Decaying Deck...sigh....

Summer 2022

Except for the size of this project and the vast amounts of repetition, the dyeing is reasonably straightforward.  I only have 4 colors to overdye.  The exception is that I am not sure which blue dye I want to use. And, I have had some not so pleasant results in the past....and, so, I will experiment!

I cut off 2 samples of each edge of every 'page' that has been bleach discharged. Then I tried out 2 different blue dyes on all of them. It seemed simple enough, to compare the colors afterwards and pick one.  However, these tiny samples were somehow harder to dye, and rinse and process, because they were so tiny. 

Blue dye 1

Blue dye 2

Dyeing blue on top of barely faded oranges, does not look as blue as I wanted. And, the orange pages were the hardest to bleach discharge. I also did not keep track of which dyes I used to make these blends, but I suspect the bottom one had more Navy dye in it. I opted for the top, brighter blues.

Meanwhile, my deck was in a very sad and rotted state. I had been replacing rotted and decayed boards for years. It was originally a redwood deck.  And it had become increasingly difficult to find a source for redwood planks. I decided to make the overall deck smaller, so I started 'borrowing' planks from the decks I would eventually get rid of, to use on the deck sections I was keeping. This worked for a while, but it turns out that the supports for the decks were also rotting, and that was too big a job for me to handle by myself.  

I hired someone to replace the entire deck, but they do not finish the wood with staining.  I also noticed while I was ripping up planks that the edges of the boards rot first.  So, I wanted to stain all sides of the new planks before they were installed. The boards were delivered and then it was up to me to stain them. It was June, and so very hot.  I used the old deck as my work surface, but it was really cramped and crowded and still had missing planks for me to carefully maneuver around.  I wanted to paint each board on all the sides, and put 2 coats on.  It was a lot of work, and did I mention hot? Wah..........  Driven by economics, I kept trying to convince myself that it would be worth it because the new boards would last longer if protected with the stain.

When I was finished staining the boards, I stacked them with spacers (so that they wouldn't stick together) and waited for the demolition to begin. 

They worked quickly and efficiently, and within a week I had a new, and safe deck!

It is so nice to have the deck sections a little more streamlined and to have less deck to take care of in the future.  I also added a little landscaping where there are no longer deck sections.  Next up is planting, but it will have to wait because our summers are too hot for new plants.