I promised better photos of the scarves that I dyed.
Here they are all after ironing and
straightening out the tassels. I always find that to be a pain.
But I do like the colors. I think the deepest red one in the second photo is my favorite. What’s your favorite? I’m putting these up for sale in my store for $45 each. Send me an e-mail if you would like to purchase one.
I met with my local group on Friday and we started a nuno felted bag. We didn’t manage to get them completed as we ran out of time.
Here’s Louise straightening out some fiber. The piece with the scraps of silk in the foreground is my bag. Because I went to the Grizzly football game yesterday, my bag is still in the bathtub waiting to be finished.
Here’s Carole using the sander. She’s trying to hide her face with her camera, what a bad girl you are Carole 🙂
This is Bunny’s bag. she used silk gauze over the surface of the bag. We all used white merino and we’re perhaps going to overdye these after they’re completed. I will have to show you the completed bags at a later date. Next month, we are going to try encaustic techniques. I’m looking forward to that.
I also dyed some scarves to sell at the store. This is just a few of them and sorry for the lousy photos. I took these photos this morning and the light wasn’t the best. I still haven’t ironed these so I’ll try and take some better photos after they are ironed.
Here’s two that just would not rinse out. Red/magenta dye just kept coming out. So I let them soak overnight and then rinsed them again this morning. They are drying in the bathroom. I used these pre-mixed dyes I bought at Wally world and the process was really simple. I usually use acid dyes for these but since they have so much rayon in them, the colors always turn out pretty pale and anemic. These dyes provided a much richer color. I like them much better.
The publishers have finished taking all the beauty photos for my book. The manuscript is at the editor and I should be getting proofs to look at sometime in December. It’s really exciting.
I signed up to take Level II Hand and Machine Stitch with Gail Harker and the first session starts December 7th. I finally got word that the class is a go and I’m really excited about going over to LaConner, WA and seeing Gail’s new studio. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope you had a great weekend!
I opened the leaf print bundles yesterday afternoon. This is the sunflower prints on a silk/wool blend scarf.
You can see that I did get a bit of color from the leaf but it wasn’t as strong as I had hoped. I think I should have kept the bundles wet. They sat outside but had dried out.
Here’s another area of the scarf. It just looks dirty in some places.
Here’s the lupines on the felted scarf. You can see I got good transfer from the string that had dye in it. The strings are all white now.
Here are the leaf prints. Very light and hard to see.
Here are the two scarfs from a distance. Not too impressive.
Here’s the sunflower scarf after ironing. I’m not sure where those white dots came from. Something blocked the dye there.
Here’s the end with the blue from the strings. It is the most interesting part of the scarf.
Here’s the lupine one after ironing. I think I need to add another layer on these as I’m not really happy with how they turned out. I’ll leave them for a bit and then decide what to do. Any suggestions?
This is what the bundles looked like last week right after they were steamed. They’ve been sitting outside on the bench all week. It has gotten below freezing several times so they are getting both the hot and cold techniques. It’s kind of like Christmas as a kid and all those tantalizing packages were under the tree. You want to sneak down late at night when everyone else is asleep and open all your packages to see what’s inside. Did you ever do that? It’s been so tempting to peak and unroll these bundles.
Here they are after one week. I’m not sure they’ve changed much. The one on the right certainly looks more promising. Another week to go. I’m not sure I can stand it.
I got the book Eco Colour by India Flint recently. So today when I was cleaning out the planting beds for winter, I gathered a bunch of leaves to try a little printing with leaves and steam. This is lupine leaves on a merino felted scarf.
Here is the bundle all rolled up on a stick. Then you wrap the bundle tightly with string.
Here is the second scarf. This is one I got from Dharma Trading that is a silk and wool blend. I covered the scarf with sunflower petals and leaves. I did not use any type of mordant with these just to see how they would work without anything extra. I did wet the scarves down first.
Here it is all rolled up and wrapped with string. I didn’t think very clearly with the string because it has been used before for shibori dyeing and it had blue dye in the string. We’ll see the effect of that later, I’m sure.
Here are the bundles steaming on the stove top. I think I will definitely have to cut the sticks a little shorter if I am going to be doing much of this type of dyeing. We’ll see how it comes out.
Here are the bundles after steaming for two hours. The one on the left is the lupine leaves and felted scarf. There is transfer of the blue dye for sure. The one on the right looks more promising and is the sunflower one. Now the really hard part. I have to wait to open these for a couple of weeks. I put them outside so hopefully I will forget about them and not try and peak too early in the process. I will post the results when I just can’t stand waiting any longer.
Ruth Lane Art 