The drying, rinsing and ironing has reached an end and I have more fabrics to show for my efforts.

These ones are the results of folding and tying. The middle photo is the results of the top photo. It’s cotton muslin. The bottom fabric is silk.

Then there was a bit of pole wrapping that resulted in this silk chiffon scarf and a dyed snow shovel handle.

Another piece with gathers (like the amoeba piece), this time it’s cotton muslin. The pink bits were supposed to be red. I think I need to change the red dye. I’m having a hard time finding a red dye I like, that’s not too orangey. I like bluey reds rather than orangey reds. But I do like it to be red and not pink.

And finally pebbles from the Algarve bound into the fabric and then hung up to dry after applying dye from squirty bottles. The pebbles have been waiting for at least 5 years (rough guessimate) for a use, so it’s nice they’ve found purpose in life. Love the green but unfortunately I’m not sure that I can reproduce it. Didn’t take any notes

There has been some progress with my quilt too.
Here are 2 photos showing the blocks on the design wall. I was auditioning the background colours for the half compass on the right.

Blue?

Or pink?

This weekend apart from quilting I’ve been catching up on my Shibori class. Yesterday was a sewing, binding and dyeing day. Some of the results are still in the curing, but the silk was ready last night.
I was trying for leaves on a background of the sky. Here’s the dyed silk before being incarcerated in plastic to cure.

Sewn and bound in knots
It was dry just before midnight so of course it had to be looked at right away.

Ironing at nearly midnight
And here’s the finished piece - more like snails and amoeba than leaves but with a bit of good will…

Silk leaves?

I’ve just finished another class at QU with Myrna Giesbrecht. It was more pressing magic and this time we were supposed to be making a mariner’s compass quilt. I never got going really, because of all my time being taken up with potato dextrin in one form or another. I’ve finally made a start, but have decided to do my own quilt top design rather than make the plain vanilla MC. Today being the first day of a long weekend I’ve been making some progress. You never know, perhaps I’ll even get a reasonable amount done. The weather is on my side as it’s grey and raining and the forecast is for more of the same for most of the weekend.
Here’s a shot of the first bits:

Two quarters
And here’s the back to show a bit of the pressing magic:

Look at those seams!
The colours are a bit off. The blue points are really purple. It’s more like the real hue on the second photo. I’m using all fabric that I have dyed myself. The outer pale pink was originally painted with purple and orange dye and allowed to dry and then sprayed with bleach. The darker areas were covered up with slices of potato. And no I’ve not got a potato fetish - it just seems like it.

Well I finally produced some results which are good in parts - like the vicar’s egg. The piece that turned out best was using purple over a blue and green and bleach piece from an earlier session. When I looked at the back of the fabric having painted on the dye it was almost completely purple so I thought it was another disaster in the making. I had visions of a dark purple piece of cloth. Having seen that I really held back on the other 2 pieces and didn’t use so much dye. However after rinsing although you can still see the purple as a shadow the marbling/veining lines are quite a bit darker and the end result is by far the best.

Purple PD

Detail

The other 2 pieces have hardly any colour on them and are rather a disappointment. So I’m only going to bore you with one photo of them. They really aren’t anything to write home about, but in the interests of science…

PD moon

So PD is still a bit of a mystery to me. I think I shall pursue this with pre-dyed fabric. I liked those results best. The others had too much white in for me.

The other good piece of news is that I finally got around to asking at the pharmacists about getting PD there. Well actually I sent Sqeze on this little errand on his Monday off. They could get it but weren’t sure if it was from potato. A phone call in the evening confirmed that it was, so I have ordered a kilo from them. That’s the sort of service I don’t usually expect in D. It’s our local pharmacist here in Schmitten. We like to support the local business - especially when they are service oriented.

I’ve not been doing much of that this weekend, because I managed to cut a slice into the little finger of my left hand with the rotary cutter on Saturday night, but I have been reading about it in a new book that arrived on Friday. It’s called “Transforming Fabric” by Carolyn Dahl and explains 30 ways to paint, dye and pattern cloth. Some of the ideas are not new to me, but most of them are and the book contains lots of photos to whet your appetite. One method tells you how to print using fish. Not sure if that will be high on my list of techniques to try, but it gives an idea of the variety of techniques described.

I did have my third attempt at potato dextrin dyeing. I had to use a bit of brute force to encourage it to crack.

Cracks at last

They look quite impressive here, but the dye wasn’t so sure. This piece turned out to have rather few lines on it and quite a lot of white. A second piece, which looked like it was going to be a disaster, actually turned out quite interesting. So I’m leaving the third piece overnight to see if the colour will be more intense. Photos to follow later.

Another course I’ve been taking at the QU is called “3 Unconventional Ways to Dye”. One of the techniques that I have been struggling with is using potato dextrin as a resist. You smear the said PD over your fabric and leave it to dry, when it is supposed to crack. Well it seems my trusty supplier here in D supplied me with corn dextrin and not PD. Corn dextrin sets like toffee apple toffee and doesn’t crack at all. It took me two unsuccessful attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery.

I am currently on my 3rd attempt. This time it was DIY potato dextrin cooked up from a mixture of instant mash and liquid starch given a real battering with the blender. The PD was applied on Saturday and I’m still waiting for it to finish drying. Tonight called for more desperate measures:

potato dextrin sculptures

Or maybe I should just start a new line of artwork.

I have taken 2 classes so far at the QU about dyeing. Currently I’m taking a 3rd course to learn some Shibori dyeing techniques. The first lesson was about the Arashi technique. Put simply you make a tube of material and then scrunch it up on a tubular support and paint on the dyes. We used this technique on habotai silk, silk velvet and cotton muslin. The results are stunning - by far my most successful attempts at dyeing so far. The colours on the velvet are beautiful - really intense and luminescent. So I just had to share my results.

Top to bottom: habotai silk, silk velvet, cotton

Two weeks ago on a Monday Father Christmas brought me a rather belated pressie. It arrived in 3 large boxes…

3 large boxes

…which ended up in the “large quilting studio” in our cellar. The following Saturday the boxes got unpacked and assembled.

huh???
They came with instructions on a video, but this being a high tech household we no longer possess such an item. So we had to make do with a scaled down version on paper.

Contrary to the marketing blurb - one person in 2 - 4 hours, it took two of us rather longer, but we got there in the end. It being a quilting frame and sewing machine.

Almost finished

We just had a large piece of muslin and rather a lot of velcro left over and no idea what to do with them. After joining a couple of yahoo groups and being reminded that quilters are a friendly and helpful bunch of people, I was pointed in the right direction and now know what to do with the left-overs.

Too busy dyeing right now, but I hope to get a quilt top finished and ready for quilting. Then I shall make the leaders (the muslin) and give my new toy it’s maiden voyage.
Will report back later.

Well it did take a few weeks to get to this point, but now there is something to look at on this site. So I’m ready to go public. Still to come a gallery with the results of my first attempts at dyeing my own fabrics. Don’t expect anything remarkable. These things take a bit of practice.

The gallery has some photos of three of my quilts.
The links still need a bit of editing.

Anyway I hope you find something here to interest you enough that you will come and visit me again.