New work, none of it finished, some of it scary

I did a bunch of errands Saturday morning, then managed to carve out the entire afternoon for printing. I ended up with a lot of red, blue, and orange, which certainly aren't a bad family of colors, but I was really in more of a green mood. Unfortunately I think there's something wrong with my year-old jar of sun yellow dye powder (ProChem MX 108). When does this stuff go bad? Every time I mix it into sodium alginate paste it curdles the alginate. It's very weird. Other colors of about the same age behave normally. I'm mixing the dye powder with straight water (i.e., no urea) then stirring it into the alginate paste. The result is like scrambled eggs. Would a little urea or metaphos made a difference in this case. We don't have hard water here so I'm thinking the answer is no. This might be a question for Vicki Jensen.

Anyway, here's Saturdays work. I don't know if these are going to get more work or just get set aside for piecing.

And, in the interest of semi-full disclosure, here are before and after shots of a yard of rayon that I tried to "improve." You be the judge. I think it might look a little bit better in person. Ironically, I was trying to deemphasize the small red squares, which I didn't like. I screened brown squares over almost all of it and it seemed too dark. I did a little discharging and now it looks sort of distressed--or maybe I mean distressing. This might be a foundation for some heavy applique.