Dyeing mercerized fabric - worth it

Sometimes I buy JoAnn Fabrics muslin to dye, mainly because it's cheap and they have amazing coupons. But if you look at the difference below, you have to ask if cheap is really worth the price.

The mercerized fabric on the left has taken the same dye recipe so much more vibrantly and with so much more texture.

The mercerization process is pretty brutal for the poor fabric. It is given a bath in caustic soda, which causes the fibers to swell, increasing the surface area, and thus enabling them to accept more dye. Mercerization also makes the fabric stronger, gives it added luster, and makes it pre-shrunk to some limited extent (Of course this process also  leaves a nasty chemical mess to be disposed of).

Fabric pots for putting things in - super easy!

A favorite Winnie-the-Pooh story in my house is the one where Pooh discovers that it is Eeyore's birthday and no one is celebrating. Pooh and Piglet rush around and find him presents, but Pooh absentmindedly eats the present of honey on the way, and Piglet falls down and pops the balloon he was bringing Eeyore. When presented with an empty pot and a tattered balloon, Eeyore finds he has both a pot for putting things in, and something to put in it, and is uncharacteristically happy! There is something very satisfying about a pot for putting things in.

The chemist and her dad are off to South Africa, and I am resisting the urge to fill their suitcases with presents to take. I saw this awesome tutorial for making a fabric pot for putting things in, and am busy making some. They will be unfussy travellers, and light to boot, so perfect. They are pretty quick to make, depending on how much stitching you add. You cut and sew 2 squares and fusible batting, which I finished with hand-dyed thread, fold, sew the 4 seams, hand stitch the pockets and you are done!

You can make the pot as subtle or as wild as you like!

And I chose to make each button decoration different.

See the light shining through the needle holes? Couldn't have got that shot if I was trying!

It was fun to play with the Sweet Sixteen again, it's been a while. It made doing all the free-motion stitching a doddle.

If you widen the base size, then increase the size of the triangle seam or you end up with a very floppy end result as there is no peltex or timtex in this pot or bowl or box or whatever you want to call it.

What not to ask someone to take on an aeroplane for you, or no, I cannot take your canary's ashes to be interred in the land of its fathers...

The chemist is traveling to South Africa on Thursday. I was there in November. Most of our family is there. Suitcases bulge with presents. It made me ponder some points about the etiquette of asking if someone could take an item with them on a journey. Most people understand that it is hard to be separated from one's near and dear, and the chance to send them something to let them know you are thinking of them and missing them is rare and special. Most people are only too happy to do someone a favor. Unfortuately, sometimes ignorance or a lack of common sense leaves the traveler feeling abused, and less willing to be helpful in the future.

In the interests of fostering happy travels I offer the following musings:

If you want to send an item with the traveler it should be

LIGHT
COMPACT
UNBREAKABLE
UNOOZEABLE
UNWRAPPED
ABLE TO BE JETTISONED WITHOUT GUILT
ABLE TO BE DELIVERED EASILY


1. Space, space, space. If you don't travel a lot you may not think like a seasoned traveler. An international travel allowance is around 20 - 23 kg or 40 - 50 lbs. For a 2 week trip, this can get used up surprisingly fast. Someone once gave me around 15 kg of used children's clothing to give to someone in South Africa. I am not a charity. I am a traveler. I have my own luggage which I need to transport. If you wish to send a lot of things, or something very bulky, feel free to use FedEx.

2. Security. No one wants to end up in a small room with a man putting on a rubber glove in a meaningful way. Airlines have virtually no sense of humor about items which may constitute a threat. Anything you send needs to be unwrapped. However much you would like to cover your gift in ribbons and bows, the person who is transporting it needs to face stern TSA personnel and swear that they are familiar with everything in their luggage. Educate yourself as to what cannot be safely transported and don't send it!

3. Self-contained. No one wants their clothes to smell like your item, be covered in your item, or be colored by your item. Do not send those cinnamon pine cones, the scent of which penetrates your very skull. No Tennessee fire water. No home made jelly. If there is the slightest chance your item may cause issues, wrap it very well in clear plastic.

4. Delivery. The onus on making sure the item reaches its end goal is on you. Do not expect someone else to spend their vacation trying to connect with total strangers to deliver your gift.

5. Make it clear that should the item be lost or damaged, or should it prove impossible to deliver the item, you give full permission for it to be donated to someone else, or put in the trash with no hard feelings at all. Do not ask someone else to transport a priceless family heirloom.

6. Timing. Let the traveler know well in advance that you would be delighted if they would be kind enough to donate a corner of their luggage to you. Do not pitch up the night before they leave and begin showering them with items to fit in. Do not see them off at the airport and expect them to start squeezing things in for you.

All of these points also apply to people who are going home after a trip. It is terribly kind of you to want to give me a gift, but mainly I am delighted to see you, and would rather have a drink with you than be given a bottle of wine to take home.

Kudos to my extended family who give some of the most thoughtful small, light presents ever! Your compassion and ingenuity is much appreciated!

Dye color chips - storing a record of dye experiments

Don't you hate it when you have a brilliant idea that turns out to be a dud? One of my new year's resolutions was to have less trash leaving the house. Consequently, when I wanted to create "paint chips" from my dye samples, I turned to my ample supply of trash cardboard. Political adverts on good card stock, the cardboard sheets that separate cat food cans, etc. etc. I had cardboard in spades. I spent an afternoon carving it up into usable 2" squares, neatly shaving off a piece of my finger in the process. Apparently scalpel means sharp.

I wound about 40 fabric swatches before the father of the artist reminded me that the artist would strongly disapprove of this project on the basis of acid in the cardboard which would discolor the fabric over time. I suggested that next time he might say something sooner...My recycling project lay in ruins. Then I remembered that I had some 50 sheets of stiff vinyl I bought to make stencils with my Cameo. That endeavor ended in a lot of bad language and leftover vinyl. Recycling back on!

"Paint chip" MX dye samples - fluff from batting

There are lots of pictures of people online who make wonderful color sample books, gluing intricate little squares into clean, white pages. I'm pretty sure that if I tried that it would look like a glue factory had exploded across Pigpen's sketch book. Plus I like to play with my color swatches, I don't want them nailed down. Also, when you do low water immersion dyeing, the range of color across the sample can be quite dramatic. If you are were going to pick a little square to represent the dye experiment below, then which little square would you choose? For me it makes more sense to be able to see the range of color across the fabric.

Previously I pinned my samples onto poster board that had been covered with batting. I lost the feeling in the tip of my finger for about a week after all that pin pushing. The problem was the poster boards took up a lot of space, and the cats took great delight in pulling the samples off. Also, the batting deposited gobs of fluff on the samples.

New plan: roll the strips around vinyl (which is awful for the environment, I know, but this was already bought and paid for, so might as well use it, right?) and secure with tape. There may be some discoloration around the tape over time, but it will be very limited. Also, no more pin holes

These dye chips can now be stored in a much smaller space. I can pull them out and play with them as 2" chips, or I can open them up and see the full range of color across the sample. The "recipe" is written in indelible ink on plain muslin, fused to the top of each sample, and cross-referenced in an Excel spreadsheet in case I drop the sample into a different color...true story....Each sample also has a unique number on it, so I can easily put them back in the drawers when I am done playing. The chemist and I spent several days sorting the colors. It was quite satisfying once, and would make me crazy to ever have to do it again. Colors I particularly liked are named and easily identifiable with a large paper clip. Not as pretty as those sample books, but more suited to my way of working. 

Some 2000 samples now fit into 4 drawers

And the cats do not have opposable thumbs so they won't be able to get into the closed drawers. The day cats evolve opposable thumbs will be a bad day for human kind, and quilter/dyers in particular!

Chocolate scented gloves

Who in the world thought up that one???

I was looking for some rubber gloves. It upsets me no end the number of plastic gloves I go through when dyeing. I found some at Marshalls. I love Marshalls. It's like a lucky dip every time. These are shocking pink Casabella long gloves. Perfect for washing out fabric. I will probably always use the thin plastic gloves for manipulation, just because they give you so much more control.

I was happily wearing the new rubber gloves, feeling like an environmental champion, when I became aware of the smell of chocolate. Cheap chocolate, not Lindt.I was in the basement. I am very picky about not eating or drinking around my dyeing area. I decided I was losing my mind (again). Eventually I figured out it was the gloves. This smell just doesn't come out. The gloves spend their lives in water, and soda ash. They still stink like poor quality chocolate.

Can't you just imagine some fresh-faced little intern in the product development meeting? How can we make our gloves more marketable? People don't like washing up and cleaning. How, oh how, can we make people love us? The intern puts up a trembling hand and suggests that since everyone loves chocolate, if we make the gloves smell like chocolate then everyone will love the gloves? Reason and logic fly out the window, the intern is promoted, some poor chemist is tasked with impregnating rubber with chocolate scent, and voila!

And now I live in hope that the smell will leave someday soon....

A yarn about wool

Ms. Twitch is a rare and very special personage. She is a rescue who had a tragic childhood. She allows only me to pet her. She hisses and even bites at any other hand, and isn't above giving even me a nip when she's had enough love for the day. She also adores to mouth things. Socks go missing. The Chemist was sewing a skirt when suddenly a vital piece went awol. I have a quilt which I could finish except that the top border has mysteriously vanished.  But the thing Ms. Twitch loves most is a ball of wool. She gets a look of complete bliss on her face when her fangs are securely dug into a fuzzy ball.

You malign me, I have no interest in that silly wool

I have wool. I have a lot of wool. I used to be a knitter. My chiropractor put a stop to that, but I still have boxes of wool. I donated a lot, and only kept the more interesting kinds that I could couch, but I still have 7 banker boxes of wool. I feel very sentimental about those boxes. They have traveled half way around the world with me. However, somewhere along the way they lost their lids.

No interest at all

 As you may recall, the basement boys finished the basement themselves. I requested lots of closets, which looked great on the plan. When the framing began there was a certain amount of complaining and attempts at renegotiation, but I held firm. However, when it came to putting ceilings in the closets, it became clear that the camels' backs were seriously one straw short of snapping, and, having learned to pick my battles, I did not push the issue. Also, I had moved into those closets literally before the hinges had been put on the doors!

Ok, I lied, but I am lying on the wool, therefore it no longer exists as far as you are concerned.

 The result is that if you are small and flexible, and not afraid of heights, you can climb into the ceiling in the basement boys' unfinished side, and walk through the ceiling to those intoxicating boxes of wool at the top of the closet, making scary noises, and even dislodging a light fixture on occasion.

Eye on the prize

Those balls of wool, which are just asking to be nosed, and mouthed, and toothed, and loved to death, or at least destruction. You can then pick one up in your mouth and make your way back to the floor and make an unholy mess of all that yarn.

Teeth in the prize

Sadly, that fun is over now. After retrieving 6 balls in one week, and finding more lodged where I can't reach them, and two dangling from the rafters, I finally gave up on my cardboard boxes and bought some plastic boxes with lids.

Hard to couch this

 I like them because they are clear and I can see what's inside, but I'm afraid that for Ms. Twitch, that is just added torture. She can see the prize, but is no longer able to savor the fluffy delights.Thank goodness for her lack of opposable thumbs.

Wednesday words: Why LiveandDyeColor?

I hated high school. I was bored and unmotivated, socially awkward, embarrassed by everything. Fairly normal, I guess. The one high point was art class. My teacher was a young woman with opinions about everything, and a huge passion for life. She found everything interesting, and posted fascinating tidbits around the class. She was a huge stimulus for me to go on to university, and I will always be grateful for that. Those 4 years were a game changer for me. I developed new skills, and new ways to articulate what I was feeling. I found out that there are so very many lenses to view the world through. I met the love of my life. I learned to stand on my own two feet. But I have got seriously off topic!

Unfortunately, the focus of art in South Africa in the 1970s was strictly limited to painting and drawing. One of the things in the supply closet, though, was a small group of printer's inks. They were translucent, the colors were rich and glowing, and they spoke to my soul. Not that I did anything fabulous with them, you understand, but when I met dye, I knew that those printer inks had been my preparation for a new love affair with color which runs and drips and oozes and schmoozes with other colors.

The other way in which high school art class set my life's course was art history. I found it so fascinating to see the ways in which the technology, world view etc. of a period were interpreted and reflected through its art. Back then the images under discussion were projected through a rickety slide projector. We looked at many famous paintings, but it was when we saw a Klee painting of colored squares that my world imploded. I have often looked for the painting since, to see if it would have the same impact, but I think that the projected image had a translucence that the painted image probably does not. In any case, at that moment, all of 17 years old, I knew I had found my passion, and that it was color!

The name LiveandDyeColor is therefore a natural expression of my passion for color and for the fluidity and translucence of colors obtained through dyeing.