And more...

I’ve also been revisiting eco-dyeing. I first tried this process back here in Nov 2011, with variable results. I recently over-dyed the two remaining scarves from that batch, first with waste water from breakdown printing, which gave them some deeper colour.

This one was bundled and tied…

…while this one was tied with string.

It toned the colour down from the rather strong yellow but they were still rather blotchy, so I dyed them again in a bath of ironbark bark and copper sulphate. Ironbark has such a deep intensity of colour, although this is more brown and coppery, because of copper sulphate mordant.

The scarves looked much better at the end of the process, and were given away as presents.

Another bath of Ironbark bark and ferrous sulphate yielded this wool scarf, which was concertina’d lengthwise, then in from the ends and tied with blocks and string.

I love this one and I'm not sure I'll be able to let it go.

I also dyed some silk and wool yarns. This silk skein was dyed with wattle flowers and leaves and a copper sulphate mordant...

… while this one is wool yarn in the same pot.

It has lovely touches of bright yellow, where the quite fine wattle flowers touched it.

This wool yarn was dyed in ironbark bark with copper sulphate…

…while this is the yarn from the same ball dyed with the same ironbark bark bath and ferrous sulphate.

You can really see how the mordant affects the colour!

So how do you go about dyeing with natural materials? We begin by filling a pot almost to the brim with the natural materials. Often, we’re dyeing with leaves and bark that we’ve gathered as we go about our lives and stored in a dry place, so they are usually quite dry by the time we get around to dyeing with them. We half fill the pot with hot water from the tap and top it up with boiling water from the kettle, just to get things happening faster. We boil this material for about an hour, checking the colour frequently. Over-boiling can lead to very ordinary results, as the base colour of everything seems to be what the older dye books call “fawn” and Billy Connolly calls “boring beige”. Once we have a good colour, we add our chosen mordant and boil for a while longer, usually at least 20 minutes.

Then we decide whether to strain the bath or not. Leaving the natural materials in the pot often results in interesting patterns, when the fabric rests against them. However, it does make rinsing out more challenging, and is definitely not desirable when dyeing yarn, as fine bits of wet vegetation can become curiously attached to the fibre. You also need to decide at this stage whether to keep the material and boil it some more later, if it seems as if it will yield more colour. This is especially true of eucalyptus bark.

Wetting the fabric before you add it to the pot will result in different outcomes than putting it into the pot dry. If you’re tying or blocking or using other Shibori methods, dry is generally better. We boil the pot with the fabric for another half hour at least and then allow it to cool down slowly. We try to leave it in the cooling pot overnight, if possible, although we’ve also had good results from washing out later the same day, with very strong dye materials like eucalypts.

Our best results have come from using Shibori techniques on our cloth before putting it into the pot. Our next best results have come from using Grevillea leaves inside the folds. Onion skins, especially red onion skins, also gave us great results, though they tend to be blotchy.

I generally rinse out my cloth or yarn under warm running water until it runs clear. Then I undo any Shibori and immerse it in warm water and a small amount of a mild detergent, such as a wool wash, to ensure all the mordant is washed out of the fibre. Often, some more colour comes out at this stage, and any little twigs and leaves. I rinse in warm water, spin dry in the washing machine and hang to dry. It’s a good idea to find the ties on the yarn skeins first, and then use this as the holding point when rinsing. This ensures the skein doesn’t loop through itself during washing.

I hang the yarn over an extremely complicated mechanism – a wire coat hanger, cut and inserted into each end of a PET soft drink bottle for the top and another washed PET soft drink bottle, with some water in it, inside the lower loop, to add a little tension to the yarn. It works a treat!

Finding out what plant matter you can dye with, in your local area, is always a challenge. I’m slowly creating a list for myself. There are good books available, but often they tell you what plants will yield dye, rather than reflecting what you can actually get. Many are written in the UK or USA, using plants native to those countries. These are still worth a look by Australian dyers, as some of the plants are garden favourites, such as Barberry, Hollyhock, Dahlia, Yarrow, Queen Anne’s Lace and French Marigold. But many refer to hedgerow plants that we simply don’t have.

India Flint’s book, Eco-colour, is a useful resource, although she doesn’t distinguish between the many kinds of eucalypts, which can yield very different results to one another. However, her book does contain a very detailed list of dyeing plants likely to be available to Australians, as well as different methods of dyeing than the one we use and many luscious photos. Dyemaking with Australian Flora, from the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria, is a good resource, although published in 1974 and sadly out of print. However, you can still get it second-hand. Jean Carman’s Dyemaking with Eucalypts (1978) is also a good resource. Some public libraries still hold these titles.

Just keep in mind that eco-dyeing is unlikely to yield the kind of colours you get with commercial dyes. There’s a good economic reason why the kings and emperors of the past wore purple and scarlet and the ordinary person made do with brown and green and grey!

Breakdown printing

Tricia and I had some more breakdown printing playdays. Tricia still had her second never-ending screen to print from, and both painted new screens. I wanted to try block printing with the thickened dyes onto fabric as a first layer.

I think I will print over these pieces to see how this influences the pattern.

I also painted two screens:







I used my Indian print blocks to print on this one, building up layers on the screen and letting them dry in between. The layers were very thin, compared to other methods I've used so they dried quite quickly. For the last layer, I used black thickened dye. The screens that have been so reluctant to break down were built up using this layering method, so I expected to produce a screen that would print quite well.









The results were mixed. The initial prints were very interesting but the screen discharged very quickly.







The strongest area of print is in the lower right corner, and it's certainly very interesting. But the dried media broke down very quickly.









My other screen was painted using more usual methods, using sponge brushes, syringes, stamped elements with plastic containers and thick drizzles spread with a comb. These are the techniques they used on the screens that were reluctant to discharge.









However, this screen also discharged very quickly.







The dye was slightly runnier than last time, because they had a problem with the screens clogging up. The humidity was slightly higher as well, and the screens did not sit unprinted for as many days. Clearly, there's a dynamic between all these things, determining the kind of results.









Meanwhile, Tricia was printing from her second never-ending screen.







She printed from it in various colourways.











Even washing the screen out between colours didn't cause it to break down...







...nor did using very runny media. The screen hasn't been washed out, since it's making such lovely patterns. The resist design looks more ragged each time, so it is finally beginning to break down.









Tricia also painted another larger screen.







Like my screens, it broke down quite quickly.











We're producing some beautiful fabrics, though, aren't we?

Three months of play

Wow, three months have flown by without me! I never really enjoy winter and I certainly don’t find it a hugely productive time. Everything just seems harder to achieve at this time of year. Although, it hasn’t been a total waste either.

Since I was last here, I’ve been doing more breakdown printing. I really enjoy this process and I feel I’m getting the hang of it now. These two below show the prepared screen before it was printed and then the resulting fabric, each about 2m x 1.4m.


Painted Screen

This screen was painted with a sponge brush, stamped with various circular objects like cotton reels, cups and circular sections of bubble wrap, and painted with a sponge brush in asterisks. 

Printed Fabric

The fabric really shows the breakdown process, with the distinctive circles being the last elements to break down on the left hand side.

The second screen was painted in uneven coloured stripes and then I drew an overall swirling pattern with a syringe.

Painted Screen

These thick swirls formed a strong resist at first (left hand side) and then began slowly to break down, yielding the same pattern in red. 

Printed fabric

I particularly like these fabrics because the breakdown process is so clear. In each case, the result is a fabric that I can see working well for a quilt, since they are each like three related fabrics.

The above screens broke down pretty much as you’d expect. However, some screens haven’t behaved the way I expected. Several screens simply would not break down, no matter how much we printed from them. I’m not sure if this was a function of moist weather and the consequent slow drying, being dried with a hair dryer, a longer delay between preparing screens and printing, slightly higher levels of urea in the chemical water or, most likely, a weird combination of any of these factors.

These three fabrics were printed from one of these Magic Pudding screens, painted by Tricia Smith. Each is only about ½ metre but I like the way they work together, almost like different colourways in a commercial fabric.

I also printed a silk scarf with a partly exhausted screen, and I absolutely adore the results! It’s become my favourite scarf.

The only disadvantage of the process is that it produces large quantities of printed fabric. My collection of breakdown printed fabrics is now quite extensive and it’s hard to work fast enough to take them a step further, into art pieces. Some are fairly ordinary pieces, so I’m beginning to experiment with discharging some of them. The results so far have been promising - stay tuned for more photos.

Serigraph Monotypes

.. or breakdown printing, if you prefer! My friend Robyn wanted to have a try, so we spent a day playing with dyes and screens at Easter.

This one was a fragment of a cloth we used as a tablecloth under various messy activities at Fibrecircle last year. It began life as off-white quilters' muslin. This part of the tablecloth looked pretty boring, so, before we cut it apart to share, I threw it in the waste dye bucket after an earlier printing session, which turned it pale blue.

Here's how it looks after printing:

It just looks like a tree, in full autumn splendour, with traces of a house behind it. I'd love to pretend that this was an effect I achieved with planning and purpose, but it's basically serendipity! I think it just needs a little painting and maybe some stitch now, don't you?

I have a real problem with acquiring or making samples. I'm trying hard to use them up but I currently have nearly 200 pieces of cloth, of various sizes, all painted, printed or block printed, often more than once. If I use ten a year, that's 20 years' supply! Friends have suggested it's time to weed out my sample folders and toss ones that I can't see myself using. But I hate to do that, not because I'm unable to throw useless things away! Here's why:

This is one of my paint cleanup rags. It was first photographed for my files in mid 2010, which was probably when it first had some colour added to it. I made a patchwork cushion for the Kambra Challenge, with fabric I block printed and I think I used up the leftover colour on this piece of cloth. It was used as a brush-wiper a few times. Then I grabbed it to wipe off a Shiva paintstik and I ended up with blobs of paintstik in the middle. Not very exciting, is it?

Ever the optimist, I drew lines on it with black pen, which made it look a bit more interesting. But it still had that awkward blob of paintstik right in the middle, which was thick and ugly and would not peel off. I thought of tossing it again then, but it just didn't happen.

Then a month or so ago, I was looking for something to use as the basis of a postcard. I realised I could cut six, 6in x 4in postcards from this cloth, and still miss most of the chunky stuff.

The postcards looked pretty boring, when cut apart, so I started painting. I laid down a transparent wash of colour on all of them, using Setacolor paints - some yellow, some green, some blue, just to unify what was there and see what emerged. Then I began to build up layers, mostly with transparent paint but some small areas of opaques. Here's the first one in progress:

I finished it in time to swap with the Fibrecircle girls last meeting.

It's very stylised but I quite like the way it's turned out. I have a couple more in the works from the same piece of fabric, also forest-themed ones.

Now see, if I'd tossed that fabric as useless, I wouldn't have made those postcards. What's a girl to do?

Things I've done this year...

This blog is always way behind, because so much of what I do creatively ends up on the Fibrecircle blog. That's not all I create, of course, but managing two blogs does take rather more time than one.

So what have I done this year? I finished a blouse for my daughter but photos of clothes look nothing much lying flat and she hasn't posed for a photo (nor is likely to, really!) So you'll have to take my word for that one.

I finished all the blocks for my Dutchman's Puzzle quilt, including the half and quarter blocks for the sides, since the blocks will be laid out on point. This may not sound like a huge achievement, until you realise that that these blocks were from a swap with my library co-workers back in the 1990's. I blogged about here about twelve months ago. Here's where I mention that I hand piece my quilts these days, mostly as an end-of-day therapy, and hand quilt them too. I realised that one of the things I enjoy about quilting is the meditative process of putting a needle through cloth and that I wasn't enjoying spending all my time at the sewing machine. I sew clothes by machine, and machine embellish and assemble things I make, and that's plenty of time on the machine. 

My plan with these blocks is to sash them, so I'll make a template for the sashing and contemplate whether I want to use one fabric or many for the sashing. In the meantime, I'm making more 6in Prosperity blocks for my grandson's quilt. I have a nice pile of them but I think they'll be set on the square, so I'll need a lot more yet.

I've also made a pair of earrings  and have two other pairs in the making. I'm a real sucker for earrings and, while I don't yet have a different pair to wear every day of the year, I'm working on it! These ones are inspired by in a book called Making Vintage Accessories, using lace as an element. As I had some genuine elderly lace (if it isn't quite vintage), bought when my daughter was a baby, I thought I'd play with some of it.

I painted the lace elements to suit some feature beads I bought a couple of years ago.

I've assembled one pair and even worn them! Aren't they so girly? The lace is silver, which was hard to photograph well.

I also made a little bag. Helen from Fibrecircle gave each of us a kit of fabric and some instructions. I suspect a sinister plan on her part to be rid of some of her stash, an idea I have stored away myself! It's a cute little bag, with a ring closure.

I've been busy all the time this year, sometimes creatively and much more on administration for the new ATASDA travelling suitcase exhibition, which is now on the road. My friend Maz and I decorated one of the suitcases this time, and here it is drying on the floor.

The design was inspired by a desert flower called Apteranthes europaea, common in Morocco, and other parts of North Africa. It used to be known as Caralluma europaea, so the suitcase is called Cara for short. Both suitcases are now on the road and can be booked on marrakesh@atasda.org.au.

I've also made two postcards and I'm currently painting a couple more, played with transfer printing, done some shaving cream marbling, painted quite a lot of fabric in different ways, dyed fabric and done some serigraphy monotypes, also known as deconstructed screen printing or breakdown screen printing. Most of that is over on the Fibrecircle blog, and you'll have to wait for the rest!

Why this shopping bag was a dumb idea...

Remember back here and here in 2009, when I was weaving plastic to make a shopping bag? I did say at the time it was "like a crazy woman" and indeed, it was.

First, here's the reason why I'm talking about this project again. I finally added handles to the bag and sewed down the top hem.

Such a small thing, but there are Reasons why this project has languished for more than two years.

First, the details. I decided to use the same yarn for the handles, so I wove the straps using pencil weaving. Some people call this finger weaving, but it gets confused a lot with finger knitting, which is basically crochet without a hook.  Pencil weaving is an actual woven process and it's incredibly easy to manage. Unlike inkle loom weaving, it doesn't require anything that you don't already have in your house.

I tied about a dozen strands of yarn about 60cm long to my pencil. You can butterfly or tie up the loose ends until you need then, and that stops you getting tangled up as you go along. You need to use an even number of strands, and for this reason, a lot of instructions suggest cutting double lengths and attaching them to the pencil with a clove hitch in the centre of the length. Take the first strand on the right and weave it under and over the adjacent strands until you reach the other side. Repeat this process. As you go, you'll realise that the pencil is actually on the diagonal. Keep weaving until your strand is long enough or you run out of yarn. Tie all the strands together firmly, with an overhand knot. Slide the loops from the pencil and tie an overhand knot at that end.

You can make all different patterns using this method, just as you can with inkle loom weaving. I knew my weaving would be folded over, so there wasn't a lot of point in making complex patterns that wouldn't be visible. Here are the woven straps:

The handles I wove had one problem. As it's a diagonal weave, the handles stretched when I put tension on them. That's not entirely desirable in a handle on a bag that will hold heavy stuff, like shopping, so I knew I had to back them or support them in some way. I took some cord straps that I'd saved from another shopping bag. They were rather like short shoe laces. I machine stitched across the ends of the weaving, so it wouldn't unravel, folded the finger weaving around the cords and stitched it in place with blanket stitch, using the same yarn as the weaving.

Then I machine stitched the handles to the inside of the bag, at the same time as sewing the top hem down. Then I hand stitched both sides of the handles to the bag, for extra strength.

OK, so why was this a dumb idea?

Well, this kind of weaving works just fine with supermarket bags, which are soft and a little stretchy. The green plastic from cherry packaging that I used in one layer of the weaving worked fine, as it was soft and made a good woven fabric with the yarn warp. The other plastic, from the shopping bags from chain stores that we don't tend to reuse as bags, were too stiff to weave nicely and had incredibly sharp edges, when cut.

The result was a weave that doesn't have much structural integrity. Oh, and hands ripped to ribbons by the sharp edges! They really aren't suitable for this kind of project, which is frustrating. Part of the purpose of the project was to reuse plastic materials like this that normally get thrown out and this clearly isn't the way to do that.

I went ahead and assembled the bag anyway, but I probably ought to have stitched the weaving to the lining and then made the bag, as the lining is the main thing giving the bag some strength. I suspect that the plastic will cut the yarn warp threads fairly quickly, once the bag starts being used. I've already mentioned the stretchy handles, though that was easy to remedy and used other recycled materials. But I wouldn't say the bag is a huge success. So it languished in my workroom for all this time, since it hardly seemed worthwhile finishing it. It's finished because I just want to clear stuff like this out of my workroom, and out of my head!

However, it is finished.

Printing, dyeing, painting...

... and all that lovely fun stuff! That's what I've been doing lately.

I'm really quite enamoured of the breakdown screen printing process. I've set up and printed several screens now and I have some really interesting fabric to show for it.

This one has been printed twice, and also been painted with the dye paints.

This one was printed with the screen after being used to exhaust the dye in an earlier screen, once most of the texture had disappeared. So it had a pink background, and some of the dye on that has acted as a resist to the second print.

For some reason this piece of fabric is narrower at one end than the other - it isn't just my poor photograph!

In this session, I was interested in finding ways to break up the very obvious rectangle of each screen print. I printed with and drizzled over some black dye paint, and I also used a sponge brush to blend some of the hard edges. Dye paint behaves quite differently from fabric paints on fabric and the results seem to be less predictable.

I've also been doing some Eco-dyeing, as dyeing with natural materials seems to be called these days. The results were quite variable, but I did create some gorgeous scarves.

I wrapped celery leaves and grevillea leaves in this silk piece and boiled it in a bucket with Ironbark bark and ferrous sulphate. The photo really doesn't do it justice. I've already hemmed it and it's in my scarf box, waiting for scarf weather.

Here's another dyed with beetroot.

This one is a pink-beige and is absolutely divine too. I have give a couple of others to friends for Christmas, and I have another two that really were nothing much and need to be added to another dye bath to liven them up.

I also made a cover for my handbag sketchbook. I've needed one for a long time, because I tend to throw important pieces of paper into the covers, and it's always falling open in my bag. I wanted something unfussy, not embellished, because embellishments would only get knocked around in my bag, and it had to have a fastener to keep it closed and inside pockets to hold all the essential pieces of paper.

The fabric was sun-printed back in Feb 2009, using paper cut-outs of daisies and clear plastic cups. I painted the flowers with Setacolor paints, making them look more like sunflowers. I'm very happy with how it worked out.

At present, I'm knitting, since it's been so unseasonably cool. I have sewn together my Highland cardigan from last winter and I'm knitting the front band. If it stays cool, I'll do the same for the arty striped cardigan, even though it's a little too warm to be wearing them. It's not quite that cold this summer!

More soon!