Hand dyed fabric day

What’s a fun thing to do when it’s 100 degrees out? Invite your friends over to dye fabric! No sitting around the pool for us– oh no, let’s race around sheathed in rubber gloves and face masks.

I hosted a dye day with some of the members of Fibervision, my Santa Barbara CA-based art group. In attendance were Judy Rys (of Color My World), Lora Martin (Loreclectic), Linda Cassirer (you’ve seen her work on the cover of QNM), Mary Norton (applique artist and beader extraordinaire), and me.

Oh, and my 2 kids, 2 of their friends, and just to add to the general mayhem, the gardener decided that Saturday would be a good day to take out the dying pine tree in the back yard. So we had nice background noise music, too.

Even with all of that chaos, we ended up with some gorgeous fabric! I spouted off the few dyeing facts I know (mainly because Judy asked a million questions. For someone so adamant about NOT buying more products, she sure is interested in the dyeing facts of life!)

Here we are, mixing up dyes:

I’m on the left, with Linda and Mary mixing, and Judy putting some fabric in or taking some fabric out of the soda ash bath in the background.

Gosh, I hope we’re dyeing enough fabric! (gosh, I hope it all fits in Lora’s car! I kept getting emails about BOLTS of fabric showing up. I thought they were joking…):

Please note that this represents only ONE area of tubs and the photo was taken early in the day. Soon, there were tubs lined up on the other side of the patio, all along the outside of my studio, and on the other side of this lot of tubs. Lots and lots of tubs. Wheeee!

We are mixed media artists, so we also dyed papers and coffee filters:

You don’t have to do much to paper to make it gorgeous– just blot up some dye puddles and you have instant color!

I didn’t dye much fabric, because I was more interested in getting the girls hooked in the dyeing process. (Shhhhh, don’t tell them!) Promise I’ll share some of my dyed stuff tomorrow.  Plus, look for the upcoming tutorial on how I dye fabric!

Meanwhile, my studio clean up has run aground for a while. I was able to get most of the nonsense up off of the floor and table, and I got all of my cabinets organized:

It was fabulous to open a cabinet and be able to pull out a few tubs that contained all of my dye product.

I have 3 shows to get ready for this Fall, and so I need to get back to creating. The studio feels much better now– and I created happily all day Monday. As for the studio clean up, it will continue, and I’ve gotten far enough so that I can do it in bits and pieces (go through my file cabinet, re-order my beads: tasks instead of big looming overwhelming projects!) Thanks for sticking with me during the process– I know, I know, I owe you photos!

Hand dyed fabric

Posting my to-do list for you all to see (and hold me to) is still daunting to me, however one positive side effect is that I am more conscious of posting work I am committed to finishing, instead of work I hope to finish. I am trying to be more thoughtful about my lists that way. Putting down a zillion chores that I probably won’t get to just stresses me out! I run from the moment my feet hit the floor, so I know I’m productive… just not always as productive in the way I’d wished for at 6:30 am!

So, with that, here’s what I did accomplish last week:

To Do (next week):

• quilt 2 quilts for Carol Done, picked up by the customer yesterday!
• load etsy photos Done! I love loading etsy– it’s such a user friendly site, and I enjoy writing the copy for my work… especially when I get to be smart-aleck-y instead of artist-y!
• contact my ISP and get my email back up and running Hahahahahaha
• re-organize my website to reflect the etsy shop see above comment

You can see that the serious computer stuff didn’t get touched. Sigh. I just didn’t have a day where the computer was the first thing on my list. I had to finish the quilts for my client as she will be hanging them in a quilt show this weekend. Excuses, excuses. I love the easy part of the computer, but I hate the hard part. One of these days, I’ll gather up some money, and pay a website designer. (note in my defense: I did learn how to edit the color/temperature/saturation, etc on my photos so that when I uploaded them, the colors on the monitor matched the actual fabric colors. So, that’s something!)

Yesterday was productive though! I loaded 12 pieces of my hand dyed fabric in my etsy shop (shameless plug) and that was really fun! I was on quite a roll, until the internet suddenly cut off, and I was forced to quit. I’ll post a few photos here, but if you want to see all of the dyeing work I did last week, check out the shop.

I was inspired to try some new dyeing techniques after reading and re-reading the wonderful books by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan of Committed to Cloth. Because the books are unavailable here in the States, I had to buy Tray Dyeing and Breakdown Printing from England and have them shipped over. I found Fibrecrafts in the UK to be very friendly, and it was fairly inexpensive to ship the books over here. Well worth the effort!

Anyway, I did promise some new (to me) tricks with dyeing, so here goes. See the blue/green fabric up at the top left? I soaked it in its soda ash bath, then twisted it into a spiral, stuck it in a plastic tub, and drizzled the dye liquid over top. This is what it looked like while it batched:

If you drizzle the colors around in different configurations, you (obviously!) wind up with different looks to the finished product. Also, instead of spiralling, like I did with the above fabric, you can “skinny” the fabric like you are pleating it (loosely) and then stuff it into a tub (a box shape this time), accordian style. That’s how I ended up with the dye patterns on this fabric:

I also experimented quite a bit with just smooshing the fabric into a box and dripping/drizzling the dye over. I got amazing cloudy patterns, and some beautiful crystal-looking patterns that way. This is my new favorite playtime! Previously, my dye days were so physically labor intensive that I worried about the health of my back. This way gives such interesting results that I may be experimenting with dye for a long long time to come. I think I feel a hand-dyed wholecloth Wild Onion Jacket coming on…..

I’ll leave you with a few more photos. On the top is a complex cloth that I think has great application for an applique’r. On the bottom, well, don’t look for it in my etsy shop– I tucked it away in my own studio while I had my back turned!