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.

Dreaming about the ideal handbag

Do you have handbag passions? Are there things you absolutely must have in a bag? Make or break stuff? I know I do. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve turned away from fabulous bags, even at ridiculous prices, because I know how cross I’ll be when I can’t fit my phone into a place that’s secure but accessible, or my keys somewhere I can find them. I know I’m not alone in wanting the perfect handbag. Here are my absolute must-haves:

• Single zippered top – I really can’t be doing with which zipper I have to undo to find the segment with my keys in. Statistically, it will be the wrong one 50% of the time. Not efficient.
• No top flap – you flip it open and get out your wallet; flip it closed (coz it’s in the way); pay; flip it open and put in your wallet; flip it closed (see above); pick up your shopping; phone rings; flip it open… it’s like a teenage girl with her hair. Flick, flick.
• Inside pocket for my phone – why the heck would you want your phone in a loose pocket on the outside? Just begging to lose it.
• Inside pockets for money wallet, card wallet and keys. I gave up playing Hunt the Thimble a long time ago.
• Outside zippered pocket for all those things we need to have handy, like the train ticket. I’m sure all those people really don’t mind waiting while I scrabble through my bag, do they?
• Long or adjustable straps – the point of a bag is to have your hands free to do other stuff. Hanging from your wrist is not hands-free.
• Must hold my sketchbook. It’s only A5. It’s essential to life but it’s also a handy repository for those stray bits of paper that come my way.
• Must hold my folding umbrella, even if it sticks out the end a bit. This is where those dinky mobile phone pockets can be handy, if they’re big enough. They usually aren’t.

If you’ll buy any handbag with a designer’s label on it or you don't much care about the features it has, all this must seem pretty weird. Obviously, your bag fulfils other functions for you than being just a pretty place to carry things. I get that. I just want a bag that suits my style.

 Lately, I’ve given up on bought bags entirely, except for travelling, so I make my own. I’ve shown bags I’ve made here in the past, but I don’t think I’ve had my bag rant before! I’m making a new one now, which is rather like the graffiti bag, but it has a couple of useful improvements on that one. The new one is made from a couple of the fabrics from breakdown printing and I think it’s going to be gorgeous.

 

This is the main fabric..

... and this is the lining.

When I make bags, I tend to think of them as modular units. I have to make six units, a bag body with outer pocket and some kind of stiffening, a bag lining (which may also be stiffened), straps, tangs to hold the straps on (optional but a style I like), flanges or tops for the bag (adds structure and generally looks good) and an inner base to strengthen the bottom (which may go inside the bag or between the bag and lining).

Here’s the bag modular unit, finished.

It’s interlined with a stiff interfacing that I bought at Spotlight for hat making, because I couldn’t get Sinamay at the time. It’s fabric about the thread count of Shapewell, but stiffened with something so it’s almost crackly like paper. I think it was sold as buckram, but it isn’t like the buckram I’ve used before. It has a zipper in the top and a welt pocket inserted in one side, so that it doesn’t interfere with the fabric print to much.

Construction was pretty easy. I inserted the welt pocket in one side piece first. I won’t tell you how to do that, as there are fantastic videos out there showing the method. Then I basted in the interlining and sewed the zipper between the top pieces while they were flat. Easy! Then it’s just side seams and that funny little seam along the bottom corners to make the base.

The lining was made in the same way, with double pockets added to flat pieces of fabric. I always add a little pleat in the bottom of my inner pockets, so they have some fullness. Great for fat things like bunches of keys.

 

This time, I added an innovation. I was going to add a collar of fabric to take my umbrella, so it would stand up at the opening end of the zipper. Then it occurred to me that I could add a plastic pocket, so I can slide a damp umbrella back into my bag without making everything else damp. I cut a strong snaplock bag to fit the collar and sewed it on at the top, with the open edge of the bag aligned with the raw edges of the collar. So now my collar was lined with plastic with the bag hanging down below the collar to the bottom of the bag.

 

I sewed the open edges into the bag lining seam, so the umbrella pocket hangs along the side seam, projecting out into the bag. I have no idea how long the plastic bag will last, but if it goes into a hole, I’ll be no worse off than having just the collar in the first place, will I?

 The top flanges were made to sit above the edge of the bag this time. Stitching them to the bag is always a little fiddly, because of the zipper, but it’s a lot easier using a zipper foot. I could have sewn them on before I sewed the bag side seams but after I put in the zipper.

The top flange in the picture is the inside, the lower one is the outside.

 

The tabs and straps were made by knife edging the fabric around the stiffener. I sometimes reinforce my straps and tabs with wire or other material that resists casual cutting, especially if I’m planning to take the bag overseas, but I didn’t bother this time.

 

I generally find it’s a good idea to leave about 1/8in fold of just fabric past the stiffener, as it makes the strap easier to topstitch. In the same way, I tend to trim the stiffener at the ends so I’m not sewing through multiple layers when it comes time to attach the straps and tabs.

 The bag lining is generally sewn in by hand, by folding over the top edge and slipstitching. I could machine stitch it in, but it’s a bit fiddly, especially with this very stiff stiffening. Sometimes I machine stitch after I’ve hand stitched, for extra strength.

So that’s it. I’ll show you the bag next time, once I’ve finished off the last little bit. I’m thinking that, next time, it might be good to add a hole with a large eyelet in one of the inner pockets, so I can put in a key ring. Then I can snap my keys on their extender to the key ring. At the moment, I clip the extender to the pocket and that doesn’t do the fabric of the pocket any good. I suspect I’ll be twiddling the pattern for this bag for a long time to come!

Another great week!

Don’t you just love it when you get up in the morning with a sense of anticipation? I seem to have felt like that a lot lately, because there are so many interesting things I want to get on with. Perhaps it’s the arrival of spring this week?

I finished another postcard to swap at Fibrecircle last time. It’s another in the Forest series, and uses the same techniques as the last one – building up layers of colour using transparent Setacolor paints. I find these postcards totally absorbing to do, but they are rather time-consuming. I don’t think I could imagine making large works this way.

This began life as a section of a piece of cloth, looking like this:

 

I love seeing how these little pieces change over time!

I also had a quick play with discharge dyeing some of the less exciting results of my breakdown printing. There are always a few duds in everything I do and this looks like being an exciting way to improve some of them. It helps that the weather is warmer and I can take smelly things like discharge paste outside. I cut printer paper into random freehand strips and taped them to one of my silk screens, in a pattern vaguely like water ripples or tree bark. I mixed the Thiourea dioxide into some of the goop made with DR33 for breakdown printing and printed the screen onto my dyed fabric with the paste, just as I would with screen printing inks. Then I rolled the fabric into a small parcel and put it in my steamer for 30 minutes. Then I left them to cool down in the steamer for a few hours, while I went about my life, and then rinsed them out with gentle detergent and warm water.

This is the first one before it was discharged…

… and here’s how it looks now…

It’s gone from being a muddy mess, printed before I got the hang of how colour theory worked with breakdown printing, to something really quite interesting.

Here’s the second one before discharging…

… and now…

This one has been improved out of sight too.
Paper stencils seem to work fine for this process. I know from screen printing that you can often get 60 or so prints before the paper starts to disintegrate, which is more than enough to do this process on quite a large amount of fabric.

 I also started another pot of natural dyeing. A branch came down from the ironbark tree outside my house and, because I read somewhere that ironbark leaves will yield orange, I thought I'd give them a try. I’ve dyed a couple of times with the bark, which gives a lovely brown-black colour, especially with ferrous sulphate as a mordant, and once with the leaves and twigs and copper sulphate, which yielded a coppery tan. This time, I used just leaves, which I set to steep in hot water and left outside. After the first day, the colour was pale yellow, but by the third day, the colour was indeed a rich orange. I added a wool scarf to the pot and left it to steep for three more days, but I remembered after the fact that the wool hadn’t been pre-washed.

The colour in the pot wasn’t going any darker, so I put the pot on the burner and very slowly raised the temperature to almost boiling. The colour was a little more intense, but seemed to be going a little more towards brown. So I added some alum as a mordant and left the pot heating until it simmered gently for about half an hour. Then I left the scarf in the pot to cool down overnight. The leaves were left in the pot throughout, because some of them were becoming trapped in the folds of the wool, as I moved the cloth around, and I thought this might lead to interesting colour variations.

The result was a nice colour but alas, not orange.

Disappointing, but it is a nice rich yellow. I may try these leaves with other mordants or even leaving the pot for longer, with other mordants added. Meanwhile, this scarf has lengthwise folds ready to be clamped and redyed, so you'll probably see it again soon.

More dyeing..

I seem to be heading in several directions at once lately, which is tricky, to say the least! Though I guess they’re really more of the same – different ways to add colour and pattern to cloth.


I did a little more breakdown printing recently. It was a screen I painted back in early July, but ran out of energy to print with the others. I have some ideas of ways to use some of my existing cloth, which involve a deep red-brown or purple colour, so I decided to print in tones of those colours. Here’s the screen:

My first series of prints used a mixture of purple, magenta and blue. These prints have the highest contrast, since there were more areas where the dye paint on the screen resisted the print.

The result was surprisingly delicate and lace-like. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, although the colour is just as I imagined. I suspect this will be too highly patterned for my plan, unless I over-dye it to tone down the light background.

The second series of prints used some scarlet as well as magenta and less of the purple. It has less obvious pattern, as the screen had begun to break down, which added some warmer tones to the print.

I think this will work well with some of my other printed fabrics.

My third print is a brighter shade again, with more scarlet and no purple. It has only small areas of print, and the colours should work well with earlier prints.

So I felt pretty happy about that printing session. I feel I now have a better idea of how to create interesting fabric using this process.

I had a little play with dyeing with the Drimarene K dyes that we’ve been using for breakdown printing. My favourite is this silk yarn, which was dyed using the Four Minute Rapid Fix Dyeing method from Batik Oetoro.

I poured turquoise and scarlet dye over the skein in a snaplock bag. It has traces of the two colours and every shade between. I love it! It was a pretty ratty skein left over from someone else's stash, probably because it had acquired a twist and tended to tangle badly. After some days of patient work, it now looks like this:

I think I'll weave with this yarn, probably as the weft, because it's just too nice not to use together.
My friend Tricia and I had another eco-dyeing day together recently, when we boiled up two pots of plant material. The first one used leaves from a fallen branch from an unknown tree, which Tricia collected a few weeks ago. However, it soon became apparent that it wasn’t yielding anything interesting, and the tree was identified as Lemon Scented Gum Eucalyptus citriodorus. So we added some yarrow leaves, to bring the colour back towards yellow, and some copper sulphate mordant. Even so, the silk scarf, tied with slipknots, that I dyed was very muted and tan.

The only thing that gave this some interest was the pattern on it. It was quite a simple process. I tied slip knots in the centre and then roughly equal distances along the scarf and tied the bundle together with string at the ends. It would have been very boring without it!
The wool skein I dyed in this bath was tied with green twine, which ended up being very interesting because, as well as the resist effect from the twine, it also stained the yarn a muted purple in places.

The best result was a wool scarf, into which I tied wooden beads at each end. Although the beads were very dull in colour, they gave the yellow cloth a vivid red colouring.

The other pot used ironbark leaves and twigs from my street trees, which I collected when a branch came down earlier in the year. We wanted to see if the colour would be significantly different from the colour using the tree bark.

The ironbark pot had a mordant of ferrous sulphate added to it. I dyed this length of silk georgette for a scarf, by folding it in a concertina, lengthwise, and folding geranium leaves into the folds, before tying the folds with wood blocks. I added some wooden beads in the centre, twisted but not tied.

Some scented geraniums will leave colour, but these ones did very little and the beads were not tied in tightly enough to do anything either. But the wood blocks yielded the usual rectangular patterns, which have made it interesting.

I also dyed a wool skein, using three tongue depressors, one in the centre of the skein and one each side, tied together…

… and a silk skein, twisted around two tongue depressors, Arashi-style, which were tied together at each end, not touching the yarn.

This one has a lovely silvery colour, which seems to be typical of silk yarn dyed in ironbark. I love the effects I’m getting with dyeing yarns. My plan is to weave something interesting with these yarns, especially the wool ones, I’m building up a good collection of skeins from the same 2 ply wool cone, which all relate to one another really well. I'll photograph them all together soon, so you can see what I mean.

I also tried dyeing with a grey leafed plant, which has ambitions to take over my front garden. I identified it as Helichrysum petiolare, also known as Licorice-plant or Trailing Dusty-Miller. It has quite a strong smell, so I thought it might yield something interesting in the dye pot. That’s the next part of the garden due for a tidy-up, so I really wanted to find out whether it was worth saving the cuttings for dyeing.

I boiled a small amount of it for an hour and the dye bath was a lovely rich brownish-red colour, so I was quite optimistic. I added some wool voile and it went a lovely pale yellow, not at all the colour I expected from the dye bath colour! I don't have any mordants, so I added some vinegar to make the dye bath more acid, which suits wool, and let it cool and sit for two days.

Despite the photo, it's quite a pretty lemon yellow, so it would be interesting to see what different mordants do to the colour. I didn't use a huge amount of the plant, as it was my small pot and was by no means full, so maybe more of it will yield a stronger colour, too.

Anyway, my conclusion is that it's worth saving the trimmings and drying them out.

We did another Drimarene K dyeing session again this week, using the same method as before. It's fun and quick and has the benefit of not requiring pre-mordanted fabric, but I'm not sure it's the best way to get interesting results.  The cotton I dyed was ordinary in the extreme, but they were pieces that had already been dyed with breakdown printing. The silk scarf was a lovely green, but the other colours on it went muddy. The best fabric was this wool voile length:

It looks almost as if it's been eco-dyed! It's mostly red-brown but it has deep areas of red and blue. Just lovely but not what I expected.

The yarns from this session were great, though. I dyed this silk yarn, using scarlet and blue.

Of course these mixed together into purple, but between the mixing in the bag and the tying with tongue depressors, it's very variable in colour and looks just  gorgeous.

The wool yarn  is just as beautiful.

It has a lovely heathery mix of colours, from quite yellow in some places down to a deep purple. I dip dyed one end of the skein into yellow and the other into blue, before pouring over scarlet and blue. It was already tied with tongue depressors at each end, so these ends were held out of the way while the dyes were poured over the remainder of the yarn. I love it and I wish the skein was larger than just 25g!

I plan to do some more discharge dyeing next week, as I think that has huge possibilities, especially for some of the breakdown printed fabrics that I like less. I'm planning to stencil and screen print with the discharge paste, which I haven't tried before.