Oops - unintended soda ash resist

Well what have we here? 

Step one: decide to dye an unrealistic amount of fabric
Step two: soda soak it all and wring out batches and put in assorted dishpans with good intentions of getting to it "soon"
Step three: after a couple of weeks when the fabric has completely dried out find some time to dye. 

What happens, is that the soda ash forms crusts in the folds, and particularly the selvages. This crust doesn't dissolve even if you rewet the fabric. The crust then acts as a resist, stopping the dye from reaching the fabric. You can see how dark some of the dye bath was, but nothing got through the white areas where the soda ash had dried solid.

Soda ash makes resist at top right

Quilt guild shared project

This past weekend we had a play date for the West Side Art Quilt guild. The idea was to bring a piece of fabric with one thing done to it, and to pass it around until everyone had added something, and then see what resulted.

This quilt had the piecing as the first thing done by the original owner. I love violet and golds, such a vibrant color combination! I brought my box of fused scraps, but lots of people brought representational items, and even 3D embellishments. Keep an eye on the green, black and white ball, it will appear again. As this one progressed an Asian theme seemed to emerge.

Completely different! The butterfly was free motion stitched by one of the members who had cunningly prepared various motifs on some iron away interfacing. I need to track this product down, it sounds very useful!

The shibori suggested wind to people in this one. 

The frog is hilarious! Wasn't it clever of someone to do blanket stitch around the sun? Looks like rays! The tree was added with colored pencils. We decided to avoid wet media for this exercise.

The problem with this kind of exercise is integrating all the pieces. I think I might remove the tinsel thread in the corner if this were mine. This one looks like a very complicated story is being told.

I think this one was my favorite. It seemed to be the most integrated. This lady loves skulls and skeletons, so we all played into the theme. See the reversed green and white ball? In this context it reminds me of a radio active warning symbol! I love the diamond shaped leaves too. There were some strings connecting the three skulls on the right to the arm bone, so they looked like balloons. Somewhere along the way the strings fell off. I do hope they get put back, it looked pretty funny! We only had 20 minutes to work on each piece, so workmanship fell through the cracks.

There was another one, but somehow I didn't get a picture. 

This one is mine. I put in the 5 turquoise circles. This group is heavily into representational work, so these quickly got conscripted into a formal picture. Someone used pencils on the flowers and berries, they pop nicely! Now I have to figure out how to quilt it before the next meeting. 

It's a real privilege to be part of a group that gets together to have fun like this!

Wednesday Words: New title for studio: The playroom

My sewing room/studio is now officially my playroom. The word "studio" sets up too many expectations. A-R-T has to come out of studios. Not experimentation, and trial and error. I need a space to play. Out of that play it is possible that art may come.

I've been watching this TED talk by Dr. Stuart Brown on the importance of play. I've always known that I needed time alone. I'm an introvert, and one of the best insights anyone ever gave me is that introverts don't not like people. They just find their energy from being alone. Being alone and being fiercely concentrated on a creative project is like crack for me. I actively seek out the experience, and I become cranky when I can't have it.

Per Dr. Brown, play is not just for kids, play is not optional, play is not an activity for when we have nothing else to do. Play is intentional, restorative, and builds our ability to function better in the other aspects of our lives. As my dear friend Margi, a pre-school teacher, once impressed on me: play is actually very serious work. 

 While I was thinking about play/work I was doodling a sign for my studio playroom door. Once I had the letters on the page I started to free-associate words to decorate the page. I doodled mememememe, and, boy, did that make me uncomfortable. Society has certainly done a number on me. Playtime is only for when all the chores are done, and the chores are never finished. Playtime is selfish. Playtime is self-indulgent. Grown ups have better things to do (such as fall asleep in front of the TV??).

It is going to take time to give myself permission to play unreservedly. I know that play replenishes my spirit and makes me a nicer person to be around when I'm done playing.

You'll find me in the playroom. I'll be coloring my new sign for a start! I'll even share my toys...

Pale doesn't necessarily mean boring - more Procion MX experiments

I have been doing Susan Purney Mark's class Shifting into Neutral. This is radical stuff for a color freak, but there's a place for gentler colors where texture really comes into its own. I'm very much liking the color play across this one. For me the trick is to get light areas that aren't just white cloth. It's a fine line!

Neutral experiments

Dyeing a gradient with Procion MX

Lots of dyeing = little blogging!

The chemist has been tie/ice-dyeing her heart out. So nice when you can go home and leave the washout to someone else..On the other hand it is wonderful to mix dyes and have someone to hand you clean utensils all the time! She took all the pics on her phone, so I will have to browbeat ask her to do a guest post some time. It is so interesting the difference between us. She is all about the folds and I am all about the color!

Lemon//Grape gradient

Here is a gradient I dyed with lemon yellow and grape, both pure colors. It is magical to see how the ambers and browns emerge in the middle of the range. None of these are colors I particularly want to reproduce, but is was good to see what happens.

To dye a gradient figure out how much total dye you will use for each piece of fabric, based on the weight of the fabric. See Paula Burch's invaluable site for information. For convenience let's say 60ml total. Determine how many steps you want in your gradient. Divide 60ml in half, 30ml, and that's your midpoint where you are adding equal quantities of each color. Parse out the rest of the graduations based on how big a color step you want. You also now have a recipe for each step. 

If you liked any one of these colors, but didn't like the range, you could now try adding black or water to the recipe for the color you liked to make tints and shades. I like to use a bigger gradient normally, as I am interested in where the color starts to change. Sometimes it takes several steps, but with some of the stronger colors even a touch of the second color pushes the first color in a whole new direction. Infinite possibilites, so little time! Of course when making a shade with black, the black you use will influence the color. There is a good exploration of the undertone of blacks here.

Here is an example of a ratio creating a 7 step gradient, with 5 mixed and 2 pure samples.L is lemon yellow and G is pure Grape. Each time you are changing the ratio by 10ml or 1/6. 

60L
50L:10G
40L:20G
30L:30G
20L:40G
10L:50G
60G

Dyeing thread or yarn with Procion MX dye

Here's how I dye yarn for couching.

On a piece of shelf liner (Bed, Bath and Beyond has the widest I've found so far) put separate patches of dyes in the colors you wish to use. My stash is short on blues, so that's what I'm dyeing here.

Preparing to dye yarn

 Remember how we organized the yarn so it wouldn't be a tangled mess after dyeing? You can see the synthetic wool I used for tying. It will not take the dye and will make it easy to untie the bundle after dyeing. The yarn is already soda soaked. In fact it is dripping wet. I find that soda saturated fiber takes the dye best. If it is dry it will take a great deal of dye to get good coverage.

 Now I take my gloved hands and mix and mingle the dye as desired to make the colors I want in the yarn. I prefer to work with small amounts of dye and add more as needed, since the soda ash from the fiber is going to be all over the work surface. This will contaminate the dye, so I don't want to put any dye back into my dyestock as the soda ash will start reacting with the dye stock. What's on the shelf liner stays on the shelf liner! Once I have the colors I want, it's batch and wash as normal. I tend to handwash the yarn as I don't want felting, and since I use it for couching it's ok if it's not as colorfast as the standard I hold my fabric to. Commercially dyed variegated yarns and threads tend to shoot for a one inch change in tone/color, so I aim for that too. Ish.

Yarn dyed by pulling the colors together from pools of dye concentrate

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).