Well, it's different.

I continue to work on the "unsatisfying" piece with the red square. Since I last wrote I've done three things to it:

• I applied soy wax in a concentric square pattern over a lot of the surface using a tool that I made from copper wire. Then, I screened the whole thing with varying intensities of dark green. This had real potential until it all washed out. The screened dye had no activator in it, so I heavily misted the entire piece with a soda ash solution, wrapped it up, and kept is warmish for about 10 hours. I've done this successfully in the past, so I expected good results. I'm guessing my problem was some combination not enough soda ash, not enough time, and not enough heat. It would probably have been OK if I'd steamed.
• On my second time around I applied more wax with the same tool (all of the first application was gone). This time I opted for a low water immersion dye bath use a recipe of "olive", which for some reason produced a deep blue-green. Unplanned, but OK. After a few hours I was rinsing it out the backyard and got a little frustrated that it looked too dark, so I decided to attack it with Soft Scrub with Bleach. I spread the wet fabric on the driveway and painted on some square and a few drips. Sometimes a little frustration can be productive!
• After a good washing and pressing I began doing some work with fabric paint last night to try to bring the focus back to the red square.

Here it is before the fabric paint.

Next steps? I'm considering some applique or reverse applique of a couple of squares of other fabric to reinforce the square shape, which seems to be what this piece is all about.