I had a comment in a previous post and I thought I would answer it here instead.
“How long does it take you to dye your fabrics? They’re so gorgeous.”

It depends on what I am dyeing. To do most kinds of silk, I can steam set it and the actual dyeing part takes about 5 minutes. First, I mix up colors. Most of the dyes I work with are in powdered form. Sometimes with silk, I use food coloring or koolaid though. Then I “do stuff” to the silk – fold it, crumple it, stitch it – anything to give the fabric some texture. Then I put dyes on it, usually with squirt bottles, so I can control where they go. I usually only mix up 3-5 colors and do a lot of blending to get everything else. Finally, I either steam set in the microwave (2 minutes) or set it with a mordant and let it “cure” for 1-4 hours. Rinse, dry and iron.

Cotton is much the same, but not steamable to fix the colors. So cotton has to sit in the dye for an hour or more.

So, it’s pretty fast depending on the complexity of the pattern I am doing. I tend to do a whole bunch of small pieces at once, so I will have a dozen new pieces but only about 9×12 inches of each one. (The photo above is acually a batch of t-shirts sitting on our back step.)