Taking a small step from printing...

I had a lovely day with Maz recently, dyeing some bits and pieces. Nothing particularly remarkable - this was bib-and-braces dyeing, stuff that's going to have something more interesting happening to it. But in the interest of process...

I dyed some cotton yarn I bought at an op shop recently. Unlike most op shop finds, it was labelled, Twilleys of Stamford, and there were 50g two balls, more than enough to do something interesting with. I often rescue interesting cotton yarns from op shops as I have a long term plan to weave something with them, once they're dyed.

It's turned out rather more... orange... than I expected, considering how much pink it had. But it will be wonderful woven with another couple of colours.

 



Then I did a whole lot of cotton fat quarters and slightly smaller pieces, thinking I will probably print on them.

 

The smaller pieces will either get used for testing prints and/or cut apart for fabric packs or used in a quilt I'm currently cutting from my dyed fabric scraps.

 

Finally, I dyed a couple of silk habotai scarves, which were kept pale because I definitely over-dye or over-print them.

 

Basically, a useful day rather than a terribly creative one, though space dyeing is always fun!

Latest experiments

It's been a bad year for creating things so far - I'm hoping it's going to improve! Just a combination of things that have made for fewer playdays.

I have done a few things - nothing like what I wanted.

One thing I've been doing is experimenting with using resists on my newly-acquired silk painting frame. I've never tried painting on silk this way, as I love the sometimes serendipitous effects you get from less controlled ways of dyeing. But there have been times when I needed some way to control the silk, while I did various things to it.

My first attempts were just to see for myself what dye did on stretched silk. I had some concept of the likely outcomes from our Shibori and other methods, but I needed to try it myself, as a kind of base position for trying out various resists.

Here's my first scarf, in the frame:

Apologies for the angle - it's hard to photograph!

I left lots of space for the dye to wick into and used what felt like a very scant amount of dye. Even so, the pattern largely disappeared (I'm sure sager heads than mine are nodding!).

 The colours all blended together, in the way I like to exploit when dyeing out of the frame, but had hoped to avoid this way, by more judicious use of dye. I can get this effect without the bother of a frame. I see that syringes, even used gently, won't get the effect I want and I need to move to brushes. I think I'll probably also get better effects using Drimafix, so that's on the list too.

I dyed this one in stripes, which I blended across in some places, and that's been fairly effective...

... but that's mostly because I was concerned about the amount of dye and rolled another scarf onto the surface.

 This looks like nothing much in the main picture but the detail is shows these beautiful delicate patterns that I couldn't have achieved easily with my other methods.

 



 Then I moved on to resists. The obvious resist for this kind of dyeing is Gutta.  I had some Supergutta, a water soluble form of Gutta, and I used it to draw on a silk scarf, but that scarf is still waiting for dye to be added next time.

A while ago, I also bought a resist called Inkodye Resist. It's made from cassava root and reminds me more than anything of honey. It has the same colour and has the same habit of gluing things together and being sticky, hours after you thought you'd washed the last bit off yourself! I'd tried it before and it really doesn't like being too wet (no surprises there, it washes off in warm water, after all!).  I wondered if it would work if I used it on a frame, with a lot less dye.

I decided to use cotton, which takes dye in a very different way from silk. I used a narrow-tip bottle to draw on ivory quilters' muslin on two quarter-metre pieces and a syringe to give a thicker line on a third fat quarter. The thickness of the line wasn't significant to the outcome.

These two were drawn with the bottle.

This one was drawn with the syringe. It was much harder to maintain control with the syringe!


When the resist was dry, I added dye in different sections of the three designs, using a brush. In all cases, the resist didn't prevent the dye wicking between sections of the design.  That was disappointing, but I'd had similar results with this resist on silk out of the frame, so it wasn't surprising. It clearly isn't good for this kind of application.


I deliberately used a light coloured dye, because I had a plan B. I switched to dye thickened with DR33 and painted it in swathes across the first design, paying no attention to the lines of resist.

The application was quite thick, because I wanted to ensure good coverage, and because the thickened dye had been standing for some months and I thought the colour might not be very strong.

I painted the dye onto the second one using the lines as a guide but without trying to stay within them, but allowing the overlapping areas to blend.

 

I painted largely within the lines on the third one, more as a control than with any expectation of creating a fabulous piece of cloth. (Just as well!)

 

Here are the results.

 

I like this one - it worked just the way I hoped it would. Obviously, one way to use this resist is to use it to create lines and pattern, with thickened media.



I like this one too. Some areas really pop using this method of applying the colour - kind of partial colouring-in.

This isn't exactly Great Art but it shows that the resist works well to divide areas, when the medium is thickened.

So that was quite illuminating!

I had some fat quarters lying about, so I used the last of the dyes I had out to space-dye them.  It's a mix of the thickened dyes I'd used and some un-thickened dye. They're not quite this pale but again, as the thickened dye was old, there was quite a loss of intensity.

I think they're really pretty. They make me think of the skies in old paintings, so they may be the start of a Celestial Skies collection of fat quarters.



 
So that was a fun day's dyeing! I hope to share more of my experiments, as they happen!

It's Christmas!

Well, it must be because I'm posting here!  It's been a few months. It's not as if I haven't been creating things during that time, but I got a bit tied up with the other things I contribute to - the Fibrecircle blog, the SCQuilters blog, the ATASDA NSW blog FibreTribe and the ATASDA web page. So my own blog has fallen behind. I think I need to manage my time a little better!

OK, so what have I been doing? I've dyed stuff - scarves, socks, aprons, quilters' muslin, kids' tees - with fibre reactive dyes. I've eco-dyed some stuff, with the usual surprising results. I've used discharge paste.

This scarf was painted and dyed over several sessions, to build up the colour.

 

This one was dyed dark and discharged. As usual, the results were unexpected.  It's very Goth - kind of Midnight Roses - with a lot of pattern and texture.

Brush Box bark, Ironbark leaves and Eucalyptus cinerea leaves went into the making of this one.

 

 

Here's a detail shot of it. Luscious colour that doesn't seem to be typical of my eco-dyeing.

And this one was also eco-dyed, in Ironbark bark. It's picked up this gorgeous subtle colouring, including the crackle pattern.

And here's the detail shot...

There have been others but I don't want to bore you. Some have sold and some, I suspect, only a mother could love, which is where over-dyeing and discharging can work their magic. Sometimes, the least promising ones at the beginning turn out astounding by the end.

 

I'm in the process of setting up an Etsy shop, so I hope to have some stuff listed for sale soon. I'll add the link here, when I do, just in case someone actually wants to buy something! But really, when it comes down to it, I guess I'm doing all this for the fun of it.

Happy Christmas and see you in the New Year!

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!

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!