Eco Dying

Well I managed to wait 5 days.

The only materials used this time around were golden rod, sumac berries, walnut leaves, onion skin and a few blackeyed susan flowers.

Here are both front and back.
They each have interest on their own.

Felted Bear - Day 3 - Background decisions

I tried several approaches to a background for this bear. The issue as I saw it, was how polished was the final bear going to appear.
This was a relearning experience for me both using the felting machine again and also trying a new approach to my bear friends.
I decided the best path was to leave him 'rough'. Identifying where you might find that style of bear lead me eventually to one conclusion, a petroglyph.

This also gave me a way to use the plant dyed silks I had made last year. Layering 2 of them over a piece of walnut dyed material gave me realistic rock and a warm background.

I added a few pin tucks and stitch lines to represent cracks in the rock. Black wool as veins gives some weight.

I'll play around with the finishing and the positions for a few days. I've even thought about adding a hand print.
We'll see.

Weekend Past with Maggie Vanderweit

What with all that's happening in our house lately, it's taken me a while to process all the information I gleaned from my Natural Dyeing course from Maggie Vanderweit of Stone Threads Studio in Fergus Ontario

www.stonethreads.ca


The new background of this post is one of the jaw dropping pieces I created on Saturday past. While I've dabbled in this for a while, (I like cheap and dirty), there were a few nagging "hows and whys" that I couldn't find the answers to. I have those answers now and can move forward with this 'new' medium to play with colours, my garden and the surrounding countryside.

I had lots of fun with 10 other like-minded ladies. It's a little late in the season and right now my plate is so full, but I will get back to this.

In the meantime here are a couple of my "keepers". I have lots of time to decide how to use this new source of interesting fabric.

Results From the Walnut Bath

I was initially disappointed with the first two efforts of the other day, but I probably have myself to blame. I have always used the cloth straight from the bolt because......

a) I'm lazy and don't preplan enough to prewash.
b) I've convinced my self over the years that I like the mottled appearance I get from unwashed material with the manufactures sizing still present.
c) I tend to rush things.

DOH.

So this last batch, I used fresh walnuts ( from my Walnut Lady... no more fighting the squirrels! LOL) and I added the material to the simmering mix and left on the heat for half an hour and then in the garage a full 24 hours.
Was there much improvement?
Not that much, but I do have an interesting range of brown. Whether things would be much different with wool or linen, I have no idea.

I don't know whether it's me, but I see a touch of pink in the light pieces.................

Dyeing - What I Did Today - Yea Me!

I have company coming for Thanksgiving in 3 days. It's too early to clean so I decided to dye.

I need more dyed cloth for autumn. Whether I used this cloth in a micro snippets way or large pieces is undecided. I know what I want to make, a companion piece to the Autumn birch, but other things may come before, I get to it.

So this is what I made. 8 FQ in golds and reds.

Out in the sunshine they glowed. (A neighbour I casually know, had to cross the street with his dog to inquire. I ended up giving him a tour with the promise his wife could come and visit.)

I did 4 pieces blending two colours and four more dyeing them singly but in such a way the colours were not solid. That's the way I like them.
So enjoy. ( somewhere along the way I forgot to photograph two. Oh well.)

And of course, my mop up cheesecloth!

Very Productive Day

( Did I ever mention I have this ScotsIrishEnglishProtestant  Work Ethic that drives me nuts?)
I've been between major projects for too long now.

Can't sit still for long!!

Started the day working on the Stepping Stones quilt. Its half done now. I'm happy with my design.

So to take a break I decided to FINALLY sort my scrap bag. I'm taking a couple of them to the workshop next month so it was a good reason to colour sort them. There isn't a bag for every colour though that may come in the future. For now there is one for Black, White and Grey, one for Brown, Tan and Gold, one for Red, Purple, Orange and Yellow, one for Blue and of course, one for Green. That should hold me for a while!

Then I turned back to my Walnut/Shibori style cloth.

I wasn't impressed with the delicate nature of the brown/pink colouring so I folded it into my RUST box with nails scattered in the folds. It only sat for a few hours, but the results were thrilling. So here it is, before and after.

This has been washed and dried. I don't think I'll be able to cut this piece, so I'll have to work on an idea to use the whole metre.

I spent the rest of the day working on that scrap bag, about three hours. Like a clown car the scraps just kept coming out. (I think at one point I had stood in the bag to compact it.) So now I have 5.

It was like a family reunion as I went down through the layers. I remember each and every quilt made from the fabrics. And of course the person who received it. 

Less is certainly more!

Out of the Walnut Caldron

I hauled these two metres of cloth out of the walnut water this afternoon, threw them into the washer for a quick rinse.
Though very usable......, I was disappointed again.
I'm thinking tomorrow I'll play with rust.
This, I've read, will darken the colours.

In the mean time I do have some interesting cloth. One, soaked Shibori style, twisted tight, and the other was loosely crumbled. I did not wash the sizing from my cloth because I do like how it plays with the stain penetration.

The colour? I've decided its a true Khaki green with pink over tones. (great camo gear stuff)
The last photo shows a piece of dark brown fabric as comparison.

Another Walnut Harvest

Hubby and I went for a walk this morning and found 8 nuts on the ground. Fortunately he loaned me his hat as a bag. Such an enabler!!

After cracking and shelling I added these to the residual solution. It was getting a little slimey but I hadn't read anywhere that said it rendered it useless. No smell, no mold means good to go for me!

I had considered for a few days re-dying the wool but decided enough was enough. (Besides, I had already begun rewinding the skeins into balls.)
So I chose new cloth.
I transferred all the shell pieces to a garment bag, hoping this might facilitate easier handling ( and less particulate matter on the cloth or in the wool. )

One unwashed metre of pima cotton I twisted tight, and soaked in water. The other metre I left loose and wet. Both were placed in the pot of walnut water after it had been reboiled for an hour. Now its sitting on the back porch where I'll leave it over night.

So I found myself some BLACK WALNUTS

I guess the squirrels missed them, but I didn't.
To play around with them I took some of my poorly dyed material and threw it into the "recipe" *
The results were so warm and complex I decided to re dye some of my earlier pieces.

The results from one of the earlier pounded pieces was so NICE.....

I took the rest of the rust stained pieces........

and threw them in too. **

The weather has been so beastly here I can only work in the basement... and that means small amounts.

* break apart and boil in water
** wear gloves!

Image Transfer - Final

I dithered for a while on how to finish this. In the end I traced the leaves in the centre and left the rest. After all this is not a competition piece where every sq.cm. has to be quilted. I like the slightly asymmetric framing. It was finished with simple stitching emphasizing the rectangle.

And, of course, because I liked this so much, I had to do it again.
But you know you can never do it again. It will be different!
I wanted a bit more rust on the fabric so after I washed the sizing out of some pure white, I gave it a rust treatment first, rather than adding the rust to the mix.
I'm actually going to let this sit for the recommended few days. Then I'll do more flower  pounding.

A Spark of Joy

I have been in a B$%$# of a mood for the last few days. That's according to hubby of course.
I dismantled the Yellow Balloons (as all my friends refer to them now, to my face too.) But I won't throw them out. They'll be used someday in something.

I've been searching around for a few days for something to inspire me. I've spent a lot of hours on the couch reading trashy fantasy.

At the back of my mind I've had two things simmering. The first one was a sample of the work of Maggie Vanderweit that I saw at the CQA show last month. www.stonethreads.ca
I'd take a workshop for this technique in a minute, but there doesn't seem to be one in the near future.
Her transfering of rust and nature prints to cloth just took my breath away.
These two pics are from her gallery.

The rust work is pretty straightforward but the leaf prints eluded me.

UNTIL........

my last issue of Cloth Paper Scissors arrived. ( I was on the verge of letting this expensive magazine die the death all subscriptions.)
This issue 67 July/August had an article sooooooooooooo similar to her work!
I went hunting through the kitchen cupboards for a good pot to use. This lead to a Rip Roaring "DISCUSSION" between myself and the Uber Food Safety Guy that I live with...... So it was shelved.
(That's probably why the balloons were SUCH a DISASTER. My little muse was off in a corner sulking)

In the mean time I got thinking about felting and was hunting around for a source of natural roving. Everything I came across was dyed unnatural colours. Here hubby jumped in again and whisked me away to Elora, my old stamping grounds, to the Wellington Fibres. We'd been here before. I actually knit him a sweater about 20 years ago! www.wellingtonfibres.on.ca
But this time I was after roving.
The woman had to hunt around for white. I was hoping to get a salt and pepper but no, and no brown either. (What's wrong with sheep now a days?) Looking for GRISLY colours. Alas, no.

So we headed back with three big bags of roving   AND

An expensive skein of "Grisly" brown. I decided I could un spin this fibre. Do I have a fibre blending board? NO.
But we hunted down the next best thing at Canadian Tire... dog slicker brushes! (McGyver strikes again!)

After five minutes of blending I now had this, well on its way to the right colour and ready for the felting machine.

BUT WAIT.. that's not the end of this tale. 
We also stopped at the Hardware store ( That was after he had me climb a road side apple tree for a bag of little green apples so he could make REAL PECTIN. ( None of this bottle stuff for my uber chef )

At the hardware store I BOUGHT A POT for my stuff and this morning I made this.

Closeup of the upper half

I used grass, clover, tarragon ( 'cause I hate the stuff and I'm trying to kill the bush) Oregano, ( 'cause it grows wild at the side of my house ) and for some substantial "meat", some elm leaves. Onto the material that I accordioned  to fit MY pot, I wove more elm leaves, tarragon and nails for rust. It sure SMELLED great. I followed the instructions in the magazine to the part that said "leave it for 2 or 3 days...if you can".......... Well I Couldn't, not for this first try. ET VOILA!

This I can do.
I can see my morning walks will consist of collecting different types and weights of leaves.
And now that I have a method........it can wait a few more days, until this heat breaks.

Play Date with a Friend

When a friend takes a trip to Morocco and brings back baggies of Dyes and wants to play.... how can I say "no time"!
These dyes are from the historic region that gave us what we call Persian/Oriental rugs. Some of those colours are unbelievably lush. This regional industry, like a lot of other ancient crafts is in trouble because of all the industrial knock-offs.
Since these dyes were of unknown manufacture we made the assumption they would be similar in to the labeled and familiar dyes available to the amateur.

It was fun discovering what colours were there, as some of the powders bore no resemblance at all to the wet dye.

There were two blues. The two bottom ones were the same dye lot, the middle one being placed in the "spent" dye solution. Water and sky!
The top one was know to be Berber blue. We got the concentration/timing  wrong so it came out a pale color, but again a delectable SKY.

The green was too weak a solution. It looks almost minty. The Ochre colour too, probably would have been more intense with longer timing. (We were so impatient.)
And the middle piece was the pale green over dyed with the spent ochre, and interesting ( to me ) tan/yellow.

And the RED we under did as well.
I was loath to use all her dye powder considering the true cost and that there was no way to replace this purchase. But we have some nice rose and pale pinks. I'll find a use for these at some point.

Then there was the purple. Considering the amount that washed out we over estimated how much powder we needed for this one. We based it on the blue and red, but that turned out to be wrong!
The mottled piece was cloth that still had the sizing. So it acted as a resist. Cool.

And last but not least are my mop up cloths. They will be used.

We had a great time, albeit HOT, but we worked in my garage and the breezes were up. I think we enjoyed ourselves so much we didn't notice the heat.
Until today.......I'm exhausted.
Good day to stay inside, in the basement, where its cool.

What's next?
She has some Indigo!
We decided to give that a day of it's own as it has special needs.