If it's been a while since you did the previous lesson, take a moment to review the steps. I'm going to assume you're familiar with making the chemical water, mixing in the dye, and baggie dyeing. Review the safety information, too, for good measure.
If you're comfortable with baggie dyeing, this lesson will be a breeze. We're going to introduce one new product (urea), and a new place to store the fabric while it's absorbing the color. Otherwise, everything else is the same.
Prepare your fabric as for baggie dyeing (including your test strips), and get out all your basic supplies. If you bought urea, add 1/4 cup to each quart of chemical water you make. If you don't use urea with cup dyeing, any portions of the fabric that are exposed to the air can take the dye a bit strangely. Sometimes it's nice, sometimes it's not.
If you're dyeing fat quarters, I find 12 ounce plastic drinking cups are a good size to use. You may choose to do a one color or two color run for this lesson. You may also want to prepare a couple of extra cups to get a jump on our getting wild lesson.
Prepare your dye solution as usual, but instead of placing a piece of fabric in a baggie and adding dye to the baggie, we are going to put 8 tablespoons of dye into a plastic cup and CAREFULLY smoosh your fat quarter into the cup. (Wear gloves!!!). Keep pushing the fabric down until the dye covers the top of the fabric -- the fabric will really be squished in. Do the same for each cup in your one color or two color run. Let the fabric sit 4 - 24 hours, then rinse and wash as usual.
Why cups instead of baggies? True, you run the risk of knocking the cup over, but because you've squished the fabric so tightly into the cup, you often get much greater color variation in your fabric than with baggie dyeing.
Another reason is our jump on getting wild. Squish a fat quarter into a cup, then drizzle another color on top of the fabric. Take another cup, and add a damp fat quarter that you've dyed in a previous lesson. Drizzle several tablespoons of dye onto it. These look really great if the colors are close on the color wheel -- drizzle orange onto yellow, violet onto blue, etc.
Remember to label your test strips and paste them into your notebook! :-)