Dyeing continued

Yesterday was the mordanting with a bowl on top to keep the fabric under water.

Then today I did the first stage of the dyeing, using the whole sheet, just poured  the powder among the folds. After simmering for probably a couple of hours, it came out a lovely pale green, on the blue side of the spectrum

Then I tore the fabric  into four parts, three for future use in various plans, one for the current work.

Then I folded the current piece, top to bottom, concertina style, and banded it tight at intervals

ending with an overhand knot.

Tomorrow when the second stage dyes, the natural ones from the freezer, have thawed, I'll do the next stage.

These dyes are a mixture of dark gold, reddish and brown. It's all going to be the background for the stitched appliques.

I have to guiltily admit one advantage of the isolation situation: no interruptions by friendly neighbors of my train of thought. This piece is benefiting from it.

Multitasking in the studio, on the one hand, spindles, on the other, dyeing, on the third, transparencies

Before I make a pot of tea and thankfully sit down with an Emma Lathen to read, I thought you might like to see the latest doings around here, in the studio, that is.  

Many doings on the renovation and on Neighbors' Great Ideas Complicating It, and kitty Duncan's downturn in health, and incessant callers at the door trying to get me to switch my utility provider, and well, never mind, the studio is always there.

So I did take a shot at making a few spindles, just for the halibut, and learned a ton about why they do or don't work. And learned to appreciate  my Schacht ones better, too.

I recycled a couple of ancient CDs with material on them no modern program will display, so no loss, and cut a length of dowel, dug out O rings from my Dorset Button Caper, and tried it out. The combo of CDs and O rings fit the dowel snugly, with a bit of help from duct tape, and all it needs is a cup hook in the top.

I tested this by doing larks head knots in place of a hook, and was not impressed by my expertise. Also the spinning action was okay, but too soon over.

And another knitting needle, with two thingies from the kit I got when we learned the braiding from Charlene, they fit well, but are too light in weight to work well, need more ballast.

Then the ancient  knitting needle and the metal thingie I found in the kitchen drawer, again, lovely snug fit, and the needle willing to spin evenly, but again too short, the metal thingie needing more width to work well physically. That's a WIP.  No knitting needles were harmed in the course of this experiment, no glue got on them, and they can go back to being needles when needed.

As you see I did test them all, using Coopworth roving, and they all made a pretty nice yarn, but it would be labor intensive to use them for long.  But a great experiment, one which caused me to run up and down many flights to corral all the ideas and pieces in one place at one time.  Never knew building spindles was aerobic.

Then on to the yarn I'd finished and hanked and soaked overnight to dye today.  I squeezed it out till damp, then put it in the dye, brought to the simmer, one hour at that temp, gradual cooling, and now it's hanging to dry.  And here's where natural dyes have it all over the synthetic ones when it comes to surprise results.  You know how a synthetic dye gives you the color you expect, based on the dye color?  Enter the world of nature.

Here I used a deep purple mixture of red cabbage, and beet with a mordant (probably alum, forget and the notes are across the room), and what a surprise when I lifted out the hank and rinsed it, to find it is a lovely shade of sort of green. 

And more surprise still, where it's draining, the dye draining out of it is the original dark red.  Hm. In bright daylight, more green shows, then in artificial light, more pinkish green.

This is where it's good to have the artist's rather than the artisan's temperament, I suppose.  I don't mind the surprise, but if I had my heart set on that dye color I'd be really irritated.

Interestingly, the other pink, the red maple and red onionskin one, came out pretty true, and the turmeric was unmistakably true to color.  So it's an interesting mystery. 

But the world of technology tends to run truer to expectations, and here are the latest images to be printed on silk, originally watercolors, one a Tyvek mixed media over dyed fabric.

I still need to overlay and combine these with other transparencies I already printed out, so that's still to come.  These can all be reproduced at will, so they will be on sale at very fair prices.  I have the original artworks, and you can still have an artwork, overlaid, printed on silk, and not duplicating the original.  The combinations will vary, so this will be fun.  Get in touch if you want to know more.  I can ship matted, unframed.

Current dyeing adventures completed

After a frenzy of days of dyeing and running about with gallons of water and lugging heavy pots and picking and cleaning and rinsing and hanging up and all the fun that goes with dyeing from natural materials, I've come to a temporary place where I can stop and take stock of what I've learned.

This is the latest group: linen fabric for stitching in red cabbage dyebath, tshirt in onion dyebath, linen shirt in turmeric dyebath, and two shirts dipdyed in mixed berries.

And hanging to dry

I need much bigger containers for the dyeing, more room for the items to swirl and dye evenly, and I need a lot more plant material in proportion to the fabrics.  

The books I've consulted are a bit conservative on this issue, but I wonder if it relates to the sort of dye material they have access too -- it varies with climate and soils -- and the kind of water supply I'm dealing with.  

At any rate, to dye anything larger than a smallish piece of fabric for embroidery, or a small amount of thread, needs more elbow room, and it definitely needs a ton more vegetable and fruit material.


The red cabbage came out a lovely very pale blue (I added salt to the dyebath to be sure of blue) but was so pale I may dye it again with another lot of red cabbage, this time a bigger one with gnarly old, much darker, outer leaves. The color you see in the dyebaths is very deceptive, as you find when you dip out a spoonful and see how piano the color really is.

At this point I've discarded the dyebath contents from today, because the color is exhausted, I know how it feels, which means I'm doing something right.  

Quinn says she raises goats so we don't have to, and I guess I experiment with natural dyes so you don't have to -- you can get it right faster! It's a great summer art adventure, though, like papermaking, which also involves large amounts of water and running about, seems to be my preferred style.

A trip to the thriftie today did not yield anything in the way of big pots, nor possible linen items to dye, but on the way home a breakdown trucker pulled up beside me and offered to buy my car!  I wonder if he thought it would be a favor to get it off the road, or if he really wanted an ancient Honda Civic from the last century. He could have loaded it right on.

Dyeing all Day Long

I have been soaking and finding and organizing and dyeing and generally having a colorful time in the kitchen/studio. 

 To date, I've made dye from yellow onion skins

red onion skins

marigolds (grown by me)

and have roses in soak, (stolen under the rubric of deadheading next door)  Japanese maple leaves (stolen, I mean pruned, from next door neighbor friend) and kale .

Still to come are turmeric and later in the season acorns and the perennial black walnuts.

The Dorset buttons 

are in the red onionskin dye and are starting to look very nice. I'll leave them in a while before I rinse them. And since that was the original impetus, I decided that I was going to put linen backcloth to the smaller doorways, to make them work better in exhibit, and I might as well dye them myself, too.  The natural dyes are very soft and variegated and I think will work well with the general feeling of them.

Of course, most of this thinking and doing happened before I got the how to books from the library, one of which is very dry and documentary, also very old fashioned in its disregard for toxicity, and the other the one on top, very appealing, about natural dyeing without using toxic mordants where possible, and with great ideas. Including the one about using kale as a dyestuff.  

That will definitely help with the kale glut around here, not that kale's not very good for you and all that..anyway, I plan to own the better book and will have it in my hands ready for me to make notes in, in the next couple of days.  I am unlikely to do all the careful measuring she does, to get exactly the right combo of plant material and water, since I don't have to have washfast fabric, and I don't need to have a replicable color.  That's my story anyway.

One part that didn't work: the cherry leaves were a bust.  Nothing at all happened after the soaking and boiling and simmering and waiting.  

Just clear water.  Oh.  But they were not wild cherry, but rather a hybrid bush type and maybe it was a forlorn hope anyway.

And, aside from the official uses of these dyes, I think I'll do some dipdyeing with tshirts and other things that need a new lease of life.  That's where you dip just part of the garment into the dyebath, and let it sort of travel on its own up the shirt.  I fancy seeing how this works.  Probably a good idea to try this on tshirts before plunging in with my lovely linen.

So this was a day of resting and taking it easy. Or something.

Doorway Three, fragile little thing

It looks as if DoorwayThree might be done, not sure yet.  But I do know that this is one of those fragile, delicate artworks that can hardly be handled. It will be a bit of a challenge to exhibit this one, I think. 

It's not that the materials are fragile, just the construction is. Between slippery copper knitted ribbon weaving, and silk floss weaving, and the nylon doorway icon woven in sort of secured, and the net overlay, it looks nice, but I have to think how to stabilize the whole thing, perhaps.  Iron on stabilizer fabric might do a job on the weaving, though.  And possibly some weight at the bottom will help.  Anyway, we'll see.

On the offchance that this completes the Doorway series, I'm looking at other design ideas for later on, after the several stitching works I have under way are all done.  Here's a longterm idea, and you'll see all the contrasts in direction and subtleties of color and shape and negative space, and well, I like it.

The other stitching works going are looking like this:

 Japanese fabric, which I'm continuing from the original designer with goldwork, dyed, and beading. It's about 16 x 20 inches. Much more to happen here.  The goldwork icons were my self teaching tries way back, and I wanted to see if they would work in a context.

 Almost invisible, a transfer image of a waterlily, on silk, to be worked with gold threads and silk, and I'm going to add in some stumpwork petals as I go.  This is probably one to work on in warmer weather, on the patio, in the aforementioned Adirondack chair. A gift from our goldwork teacher.

And here's an initial set, created as an exercise in our goldwork class last year.  I dyed the thing with silk dye, after the stitching, and got quite a surprise at how the stitching all shriveled up and crinkled, but I managed to restore it with pressing and resting a printmaking press on it.  

I'm think that this, beaded and with more stitching, not yet decided if it will be a Japanese stitching deal, or what, but it will be a signature piece, once framed, to show up at the next exhibit just as my signature to the show.