Blues and greens on Etsy

I was just honored with an Etsy Treasury page!  The page features many beautiful blues and greens, and one of my hand-dyed fabrics called “Mediterranean Sea” sits proudly among the other treasures!

Click here to visit the treasury list called Water Nymph.

Thanks, Kelly!

My etsy page Wild Onion

Thermofax screened fabric and discharge paste

I promised you photos of the beautiful fabric Judy gave me as a thank you for hosting Dye Day 2008:

Judy took a photo of some drain pipes featuring her favorite totem, the circle. Andi made the thermofax screen, then Judy went to town, creating this special fabric. I haven’t put it away yet– I like to walk by and admire it. I also received the discharge paste as a little sump’in sump’in!

Ahhhh. I love prezzies from my artsy friends!

Thanks again, Judy!

My hand dyed projects from “Dye Day 2008″

I promised to show you some of the fabric that I dyed over the weekend. I did get sidetracked yesterday with my dye tutorial, but I try to keep my promises…especially when I make them so publicly!

Linda brought over some of the new Procion MX dye colors from Dharma– I was especially in love with Palomino Gold and Truffle. Oxblood was very bloody red. I might have to re-name it in my mind….It does make a nice deep red– not too orange, not too blue.  Kind of… bloody.

Here is an old white tee shirt that got updated with some green, royal blue, and Cayman Island:

I ended up with some white splotches which I believe are the results of the Misty Gray dye powder. The color description says it’s an “elusive gray color”. Very elusive, I’d say.

I dyed a bunch of bandanas, because I like to wrap my head in color:

I’ve been wanting to play with Dharma’s silk/rayon devore scarves, so I got one of them in a dye bath (why is the photo ginormous? who knows.)

I used Palomino Gold, and the color does shift between the rayon and the silk– isn’t it beautiful?

I’ve also been toying with the idea of dyeing a silk batting. I bought a sample batt from Richland Silk. It’s a very yummy soft silk, but there is no scrim or needlepunching. This means that while the silk fibers are in a batting shape, there’s nothing to hold the silk in place. Any little burr– even dry skin on your cuticle– will pull at the delicate silk. I am becoming experienced with this process, so it didn’t bother me, and the batt turned out exactly as I’d hoped:

Unfortunately, I can’t find Richland Silk anymore (anyone out there have their information?)  The batting is really a very large silk “hankie”.  I’ll have to do some research and see if I can find more of these oversized hankies.  The new Hobbs silk batting has a polyester scrim, which makes it easier to handle, but that poly won’t take the dye.

Tomorrow, I’ll share a beautiful gift I got from Judy Rys!

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!

Umbria roof (fiber)tiles, a tyvek tutorial

The Brady Bunch cottage cheese texture (the only texture I hate!!) has been scraped off of DS1′s new room-to-be. I’ve been up since 6:30 to start painting said ceiling and it’s time to get to the walls. But first, a blog post! I am so totally procrastinating! And that was so totally a So. CA sentence from this Midwest girl!

I promised to share some step-by-step photos of my fiber tiles made with fabrics and Tyvek. Without further ado, but with some procrastination of the painting kind, here goes.

The roof “tiles” from my fiber piece, Umbria: Roof I were fascinating for me to make. I drew heavily from the book, Surfaces for Stitch by Gwen Hedley. After reading it cover to cover, and then going back and reading it again, I closed it, grabbed a journal, and began scribbling ideas from memory. This way, I was able to merge Gwen’s instructions with my own experiences and ideas. This was a new way of organizing my experimentation, and I must say that I like it. Not only does it arrange my ideas, but it keeps me going when I get interrupted. I don’t make a firm step-by-step list, but rather a loose gathering of ideas, with notations on “what if’s” and “try this’es”. In addition to helping me through the tedious and numerous interruptions to my day, it also helped me get over the initial resistance I always feel when trying new ideas. What is that about, anyway?

On to my roof tiles. I first gathered together most of the fabrics I thought I might use. I hand-dyed and painted several segments of cotton, silk, dry baby wipes and paper towels (great texture!), used dryer sheets, cheesecloth, and lace. Some fabric was rusted. The inspiration photo of the actual roof tiles in Italy was indispensable for color. Here is a photo of the gathered fabric, with some painted Tyvek in the center:

To paint the Tyvek, front and back, I grabbed some craft acrylic paint in the tile colors, and swiped it on randomly. I did experiment with different patterning, but in the end, it didn’t make any difference to the finished product.

Next up: play time! I cut random chunks of different fabric, laying them down on a square of painted Tyvek. Sometimes the fabric hung over the edge.

Then, I took the square to my sewing machine, and sewed my beloved interlocking circles. Around and around and around I sewed. Wheee!

The above photo shows an experiment on unpainted Tyvek.  I ended up zapping the Tyvek enough to have it shrink back and hide behind the fabric, so I didn’t paint the tyvek for this tile.

Once the squares were sewn, I took them outside, along with my heat gun and a chopstick to hold the square in place. The chopstick complained less about the heat from the air gun than did my fingers. Ouch! I have a cheapie heat gun from Michael’s, so I let it run for a few minutes to heat up.

I experimented with zapping the square with hot air from the back and from the front. The back side won, hands down. The Tyvek curls and bubbles and generally has a party, all the while being constrained by the sewn lines. Here is a specific square, shown before and after zapping:

Below (shown before being zapped) is an experiment that, to my eyes, is a failure:

I had a square of Tyvek/fabric and couched on some yarn. I didn’t realize that the yarn made such a pronounced “S” shape (really, I was just going for some curves, but the small size of the initial square didn’t allow for much patterning with the yarn….) I had hoped that the shrinking Tyvek would obscure the “S” in some freeform way. Didn’t happen.

I share these yucky photos because I always find much to learn from failure, and I will definitely try adding yarns to the Tyvek square again.

Well, I have to go paint the walls of DS1′s room now. I do have some more close up’s of the squares to share, plus some other experiments. You won’t have to wait too long to see those– I have a whole ‘nother bedroom to paint, so I’ll need to have some more procrastinating excuses!

Note:  another tyvek tutorial follows this blog post!  I’m on a roll!!