Darling Harbour Craft and Quilt Fair

Here are some of my pretty things that will be on display and for sale at the ATASDA stand at the Craft and Quilt Fair at Darling Harbour this week.

Silk scarves...

... bags from break down printed cloth...

...hand dyed adults' and kids' socks...

 

...and our special hand-dyed reusable gift bags, that let you save a tree and make the wrapping part of your present.

   

ATASDA will have a wonderful range of textile art works to see and buy, and artists will be demonstrating all kinds of amazing techniques morning and afternoon.

I'll be on the stand on Thursday afternoon, Why not come by and say hello?

Some new scarves

Just a quick update on some scarves I've dyed in the last month.

Well, "in the past month" is a misnomer for some of these, which I started last year. This one was begun in July last year, when it was tied with string and dyed in a pot of ironbark bark. The result was a bit grey and boring so I wrapped it around some galvanised washers and redyed it in wattle flowers. The flowers were a bit less yellow than I'd hoped, though it did liven it up. But not enough, so I overdyed it with a pink-orange and yellow. Now I like it!

This one was also dyed midyear, with blocks tied on it, in a wattle flower bath. The result was the dreaded fawn, so I tied some teardrop-shaped wooden beads into the ends with cotton thread and redyed it in a bath  of Samoan hardwood sawdust. It gave a stronger pattern but it was quite dark. So I overdyed it with yellow dye, to lift the pattern.

This one was also dyed naturally, with diamond blocks in a bath of Eucalyptus cinerea, which gave me a pale orange and white scarf. I thought it could look better, so I overdyed it with turquoise fibre reactive dye, which brought out the angular pattern more strongly.

This one had some unknown gum leaves clamped on it with blocks and was dyed in the Eucalyptus cinerea pot. The leaves did very little other than add muted texture to the pale orange of the scarf. It was a bit lacking in excitement so I overdyed it with fibre reactive dye in a mixture of warm colours. It livened it up a  but but emphasised the dark pattern from the leaves. I think it may need some block printing or something to strengthen the ends and make them look a bit less brown.





This one is a silk tissue length, which was dyed pale blue in the waste water bucket. Then I twisted it back on itself and overdyed it with dark blue and purple. It's very delicate and pretty!

These two seem positively simple by comparison. This silk habotai scarf was dyed with a mixture of two greens, yellow and turquoise.

This silk tissue scarf was dyed in the waste water bucket, over the course of a dyeing session, as an experiment. I took it out several times and retied it differently, so it picked up the changing colour in different ways.

The interesting thing about these is that I sold them almost immediately to family members. I've never had scarves disappear so quickly!

Pleased as Punch!

I wonder where that expression comes from? Punch and Judy, I guess, so maybe I'm not that pleased! But I am pretty happy. You see, I sold some stuff. OK, selling stuff is always good but it's more the who than the actual selling. The Fibrecircle group rarely shows work at ATASDA, although we are all members, so we decided to take a table at the March meeting to show, and maybe sell, some of the things we make. We were completely blown away by the positive response from other members. Remember, these are people who "make stuff" themselves, and they are very textile-savvy people. So it was brilliant to get such a great reaction and, yes, to sell things to this market.

So what have I been making lately? Most of my energy (read:lethargy), post-Christmas, has gone into making a bag for the Fibrecircle challenge. We each chose four paint chip cards, sight unseen, and we had to make something larger than a postcard, using only those four colours. It's something that quilters often do, to challenge themselves, but I haven't seen it done much among textile artists.

My paint chips looked like this:

I think I was very lucky in my selection. My only reservation was that they might be difficult colours to match, so I might find it hard to get materials together. My dyeing skills are coming along apace, but I'm not yet at the point where I can dye a specific shade with 100% confidence. I scoured my whole stash, fabrics, yarns, threads of all kinds, and assembled a bundle of things in the colour range.

Strangely, the colour I thought would be hardest to match, the rusty red, was easiest! Turned out, I made my daughter a corduroy pinafore (for US readers, a jumper) in the exact colour, back when she was about ten, and I had quite a few remnants left over. This is more than twenty years ago, so I guess this means it's pretty much vintage fabric now? 

The turquoise was also fairly easy to match and, as well as a stash quilting cotton, I was able to dye some cotton fabric. The difficult shade was the green. In the interest of finishing this bag before I died of old age, I decided to hand embroider my corduroy fabric, since threads are easier to match. Hand embroidery also suited my January energy levels. I drew designs inspired by Jacobean embroidery freehand onto the cloth with chalk. Here's how it looked with the embroidery mostly done.

Once the embroidery was done, there was the usual modular assembly. I'm not sure I've talked about that specifically before, so I'll add a how-to shortly.

I interlined the bag with Shapewell interfacing and the flaps with a heavy Pellon material, like thin Timtex. The top zipper was from my extensive zipper stash, coloured to match the red fabric, but I found I needed to buy the turquoise zipper for the front pocket.

It's wasn't quite finished by the due date,because I could only buy gold D rings and I found I had only silver rivets left. That being remedied, here it is:

Isn't it purty?
Off to do some dyeing now! I have been dyeing a stack of stuff, which I'll share next time.

Four days til Christmas!

Where did the year go? If I look back on my blog, it was clearly filled with interesting and creative times! In January, I was weaving plastic strips into a bag. By March, I was making earrings and a bag, as well as getting the travelling suitcase exhibition on the road. From May until August, I was constantly doing breakdown printing – a fascinating process! And from August til now, I was dyeing like a madwoman, both with native plants and with fibre reactive dyes. And painting fabric, which is my fall back activity.

At this moment, I’m putting together the last jumper I knitted in the cool weather, making another bag, piecing quilt blocks by hand and dyeing anything that stands still long enough. Oh, and I have weaving on the loom. No wonder that I haven’t paused to update the blog recently!

So what’s been happening in the last month or so?

First of all, my friend Jennie brought me back some gorgeous presents from Canada. First, there was this beautiful trivet, which, contrary to expectations, is made of glass! It’s very light and a truly gorgeous colour, and of course, has the Canadian maple leaf.

Second, she found this fantastic French Canadian cookbook at a stall. Its title translates as “from the garden to your table”, which is very much my food preference! It tells you, in French, about the various fruits and vegetables and then gives you interesting recipes to make with your produce. I haven’t made anything from it yet, but some of the recipes sound delicious.

Third, she gave me this beautiful calendar of Inuit art from Cape Dorset, a village on Dorset Island in Nunavut in Canada. The style of art is simple but it has a luminousness and delicacy that I love. You can read about the history of this artists’ cooperative here and see their work here .

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some more discharging, with thiourea dioxide. It will be the last time for 2012, because it’s an outdoor activity, due to the toxicity of the chemical, and it’s getting too hot now. It’s a shame because I have a pile of fabric I want to use for this process and I really love the effects I’m getting.

 I began with screen printing, using a paper stencil on the screen. I really like the interesting effects I get with very simple repeat patterns done this way. It takes an ordinary piece of dyed cloth and improves it out of sight. I made up a Thiox solution and thickened it with DR33, to make a print paste. The Thiox needs to be used quite quickly to be effective, so you need to be set up, ready to go, when you do this step.

This is the pattern on my screen.

(Ignore the blue tinge; in this photo it had a block out agent applied after printing, so I could save the negative of the screen and use it again next time.) As you can see, the pattern has been cut freehand in strips and taped on. My cloth was cotton that I’d deliberately dyed dark with leftover dye at the end of a dyeing session, thinking it would discharge in an interesting way.

Once it was printed and steamed, it looked like this:

It's amazing how the eye makes the lines join up, even when they don't.

 

I don’t have a “before” photo for this fat quarter of cloth, but it was also dyed very dark with a mixture of colours in a dyeing session. It was printed with a second screen in the same way as the first.

Then I moved on to printing. I bought an interesting potato masher that I thought would be good for this process. I used it to stamp onto another fat quarter of cloth from an earlier dyeing session.

 

Here's the dyed cloth:

...and here it is discharged:

It’s rather good, isn’t it? I think it makes a better print block than it does a potato masher!

I also wanted to experiment with adding colour to the discharge process. I didn’t have any appropriate dyes, but I did have some powdered pigment, which I used to make up paint for my kids, about twenty-five years ago. I wondered if it would be permanent on discharged cloth. I mixed some of the blue powder into the discharge paste and stamped with the potato masher again, onto a piece of dyed cloth.

 

It looked very dark when it was wet but once it dried and was steamed, it became much lighter, so I guess I’ll need to add a lot more powder to get intense colours.

I'll be experimenting further with this combination, when the weather cools down.

I’ve also been doing some natural dyeing. The Fibrecircle group got together for a dyeing day and the results are on our blog here. Here are some of mine that I really like.

Silk paj, tied on square blocks with E. cinerea leaves in the folds, dyed in ironbark E. sideroxylon bark and ferrous sulphate.

  Silk paj,concertina's in three, folded with cinerea leaves and tied onto Tricia's parallelogram perspex blocks, dyed in a bath of helichrysum petiolare and alum.

Silk paj, tied on tongue depressors with green twine, dyed in a bath of Eucalyptus pilularis Blackbutt wood shavings and alum

This one has delicate green markings from the twine that haven't showed up well in the photograph. I love it!

Silk paj, pleated and tied with green twine, dyed in ironbark and ferrous sulphate. This one wasn’t used at Tricia’s, because the twine was obviously bleeding green dye onto the cloth and we were concerned about contamination. But there was very little green on it or in the dye bath.

These three wool skeins came out in an interesting way. I pre-soaked a scarf which had brown onion skins tied into it, and I noticed that the water was coloured. So I left two wool skeins, 2ply and 8 ply in the water for a couple of days. They both came out a gorgeous pinky colour. Then I dyed them in cinerea, wrapped around tongue depressors. So there are areas of dark pinky-beige and then darker areas from the cinerea.

 

This darker one was tied the same way but with green twine, which darkened the colour significantly.

And then there’s the Drimarene K dyeing.

 

I over-dyed some prevous eco-dyed and fire-reactive dyed scarves. This scarf had beads tied into the ends, and was dyed yellow and orange. The mokume areas weren't very successful so I retied them and redyed. I really like it now!

This scarf was eco-dyed with machine stitching along the ends. It looked pretty ordinary, so I clamped it with large metal washers and over-dyed it with blue fibre-reactive dye.

It's much improved too!

 

This one was bunched and tied and dyed with diluted fibre reactive dyes.

 

I dyed more socks too (I'm loving these!):

…and a tee and shorts for my granddaughter.

I did a whole lot of other stuff too, which I expect will show up here sooner or later!

So another year is almost over. I wonder what the next year will bring? I’m foreseeing lots of creative messy times!

Handbag done, and more dyeing

Progress at last! I’ve finished my bag and shown it at the challenge unveiling. You can read about that and see all the challenge works on the challenge blog here.

 

So here it is, in all its glory.  

I’m really happy with how it worked out.

I’ve also been having fun with putting colour onto cloth and yarn, with various methods.

First, I’ve done some more natural dyeing. This white 2-ply wool yarn skein was rolled around two tongue depressors, which were folded back on themselves and tied at each end, not on the yarn. The wool was soaked in water before adding to the wattle dye pot.

The same white 2-ply wool yarn was plaited onto two tongue depressors, which were folded together and tied at each end, without tying the yarn. The yarn was soaked before dyeing in Eucalyptus cinerea.

The same white 2-ply wool yarn was twisted around a single tongue depressor and dipped into a bath made from sawdust from David’s workshop. I put about two cups of the mixed sawdust into a calico bag and poured over hot water. This sawdust is mostly from Samoan hardwood, with some Blackbutt mixed in. The dye bath almost immediately went very dark brown. I left it to steep for a couple of days. Then the wool was added and the mixture was boiled for an hour.

I also dyed some silk scarves. This white silk PFD scarf was concertina’d and ironed lengthwise into quarters. This was folded as a concertina to match a large diamond block and smaller diamond blocks were clamped on, so there was an area of fabric around the block. The scarf was soaked in water before dyeing in the E. cinerea pot.

A wool etamine length had seven rows of small wooden beads tied into each end in an offset pattern to yield diamond-patterned dots. The cloth was soaked in water before dyeing in the E. cinerea pot. The beads tend to lose a little colour with boiling, which transfers to the cloth.





This scarf was folded in half and clamped at each end with L-shaped blocks. It was dyed in a wattle flower dye bath.  

It was fairly ordinary so I blocked it again with triangle blocks and dyed in with dark blue Drimarene K dye.

I’m really enjoying the Drimarene K dyeing. This silk yarn was laid down on Gladwrap and dyed with a syringe, with rubinole, turquoise, blue and black.

This is a loosely woven silk yarn from Virginia Farm Woolworks. I syringe-dyed this damp, using red, orange and yellow.

 I tried out a different Shibori technique with this piece of cotton cloth. This long strip of quilter’s muslin was folded in 60-degree triangles. Two corners were dipped into rubinole and turquoise, with the tips dipped in black.

I can see a scarf using this technique in my future!

 

This silk scarf was concertina’d into four, lengthwise, and syringe-dyed blue, rubinole and turquoise.

 

These four fat quarters of cotton cloth were layer-dyed in a cup, by adding a little dye and poking cloth down onto it with a chopstick. The first dye was blue, then yellow, then orange, then red, then yellow again.

 

I’ve also been space dyeing some cotton socks. I am so in love with these!

This silk scarf isn’t finished yet. I tied it in Kanoko with large beads, which were painted with yellow dye. I had drips and bleeds, so I capped the beads with plastic and rubber bands and painted the whole scarf in yellow and orange. The orange also bled into the bead area, so, after batching, I washed the scarf out and dried it with the beads still in place. I replaced the rubber bands with another set of ties over the plastic. I plan to redye it darker, as it’s much brighter than I would use, and I hope the double tying and the plastic capping will protect the colour over the beads. We’ll see….

Next, taking colour out of cloth. Even more fun, I think.