Adventures in Eco Printing

We've been having very hot weather lately which is great but it's been too hot really to steam plants for two hours in the kitchen.  And I don't really want to bring my little two element burner outside and do it there either because I would be in the hot sun.  So I decided to put some silk scarves on rods (make bundles) and put them in ziploc bags.  Then I put them on my deck in the afternoon.   I figured that the deck is hot enough to steam my bundles.  I went out and turned them over once in a while.   Below is a photo of my plant material on top of the silk scarf.  You can see I put a layer of cling film on top to keep the colours from bleeding through when they're rolled onto the rod.

Here's my set up on my kitchen table.

And here are my bundles on the deck.  You can see the steam inside the bags.

So after a week or so I opened them up with great excitement.  Here is the plant material all stuck to the cling film which made it easier to clean up.  I did decide though to pick it all off so I could put it in recycling. 

I unrolled the bundles and hung them to dry.  I left the scarves for a few days to cure the colours.  Today I washed them out and here is one of them all dry and ironed below.  I'm really pleased with how it worked out.  The colours are very strong.  I would say it worked out as well as with the steaming pot.  I just need to fine tune my layouts a little but I really like the results.

And here's the other one below.  I think I could have opened them sooner than a week.  We had hot weather (around 30 C) pretty much every single day.  Red onion skins certainly work very well.

I now have a few more silk scarves rolled into bundles on the deck which have different plant materials and done with alum instead of vinegar.  I'm looking forward to seeing the results again.  Stay tuned!

Week at cottage

We had a week of vacation last week and I made a few things at the family cottage.  The weather has been very hot which has made it a little difficult to be outside.  I dyed some silk scarves with Colorhue dyes.  I ordered these from G&S dye and thought I would try them out.  They're instant set meaning that as soon as you put the colours on they stay where they are.  Even trying to brush another colour near it the colours won't really mix which is surprising.  Once the fabric is dry the colours are set.  Here are a few silk scarves drying on the wash line.  I did some folding and shibori techniques on silk crepe scarves.

I also did a bit of sunprinting.  I tried making a more patterned background on this one.  I usually just brush on some colour and then put on the plants.  This time I printed on some colour with a sponge and then put on the plant.  I did add some salt at the bottom.

I also did a flour paste piece.  Although I had done some before, this is one of the techniques that I learned more about in a workshop with Gunnel Hag last September in Ottawa.  It takes a little more work.  I made a paste with white flour and water and put it on a piece of white cotton fabric.  After it dried I scrunched it up to create cracks.  I painted on some fabric paint.  I let it dry.  Then I scrunched it again and added another colour.  I did this a few times.  It all takes time to dry.   The sun was luckily hot enough to set the colour.  Then after leaving it overnight I finally soaked it in warm water and washed out the flour paste.  Below is the fabric with flour paste and paint on it.

And here is the finished piece hanging on the line.  The crackling was quite successful.

Here's a close up of the crackling below.  Thanks for stopping by!

cactus flowers

My friend Pat gave me a bunch of frozen cactus blossoms to experiment with.  She has an Orchid Cactus.  I covered the flowers in white vinegar in a jar and left them overnight.  I then heated the flowers vinegar mixture to a boil and took it from the stove.  After steeping awhile I removed the flowers and put in some yarns (they're mostly wool).  I'm very pleased with the results!  Who would have thought the colour would be so strong.  There were quite a few flowers.  I didn't use any mordant and rinsed them out thoroughly afterwards.  I want to use the dye mixture with something else.  Let me know if you're experimenting with natural colours by commenting below.

Dyeing yarn with natural materials

A few months ago a friend gave me some white wool yarn to dye naturally.  I wanted to use dye materials easily found at a grocery store.  I've finally gotten around to it and here are the before and after pictures.  I started out with white woolen yarn, some with a bit of nylon in it or other fibre.

So far I've used turmeric powder, frozen wild blueberries and dried hibiscus flowers to colour the yarn.  The green was made with a mix of turmeric powder and blueberries and the orange/brown was made with a mix of turmeric and hibiscus.  I used alum to fix the colours.

I still have a bit of white yarn left and I'm deciding what to try next.  Apparently avocadoes skins and pits make a nice pale peach/pink colour. And black beans make a nice blue colour but I already have blue. Hmm we'll have to see.  I'm hoping my friend will knit something with it.  Thanks for stopping by!

Rusting and Bleaching workshop with Gunnel Hag

I went to Toronto a few weeks ago and went to a workshop with Gunnel Hag at her studio.  I really enjoyed the workshop.   She showed us how to rust and bleach fabrics.  The rusting I had done before but the bleaching was kind of new for me.   I'm so used to adding colour to white fabric but in this case we were subtracting colour.   We used dark fabrics.  When you bleach them you reveal the colours underneath.  I used black and dark blue cotton and fabrics to bleach.  Under the dark blue there was a pinkish colour and under my black fabric there was a peachy colour.  I would like to try using dark green and other darker fabrics too.

This is a dark blue fabric that I folded up into a square and put a circle resist (mason jar lid) on both sides with a clamp and then dipped in the bleach solution.  Next time I want to make it an even quicker dip to have more circle showing afterwards.

Here's a close up of one of the circles.  You can see the imprint of the lid.

For the fabric below, I sprayed the bleach solution onto my fabric after laying some leaves and grasses on it.

On this black fabric I stamped a thickened bleach solution.  I used light pressure so that they wouldn't be perfect squares.

On the fabric below I used a synthetic paint brush and brushed on the bleach solution.

 

For this dark blue fabric I wound it around a bottle and wound string around it.  Then I dipped it in the bleach solution.

I used the same winding string method on this black t-shirt.  I used a larger cylinder to do it this time.

Here's the back of the t-shirt.  The patterns on the back are neat too.

Here's one of the rusted fabrics I made.  It started out as a piece of light blue silk curtain material.  The rust turned it grey.  Thanks for having a look!

Recent projects

Recently I did a bit of printing with a piece of styrofoam that I found in some packaging material at work.  It looks like a hockey puck but it's made up of two rings and a centre which interlock. Below is some printing in which I separated the parts to print different colours in a circle.

This is a close up of a print.  You can see it's kind of fuzzy because of the styrofoam.

Here I used part of the styrofoam stamp to make the centre of these blue flowers.  Then I added petals around the centre. The petal stamp was carved from an eraser.  The background fabric was something I made earlier with pole wrapping.

Here's a close up below of the flowers.  I like the way the background shows a little through the petals. I'm still deciding whether to make stems or not.

 And on a completely different note, I sewed together some plastic food packaging into a large rectangle on the weekend.  I'm not sure yet what I'll make with it.  But at least I could make a shopping bag with it.  Thanks for having a look!

Post Fibre Fling 7

So the show went well this past Friday and Saturday.  I actually sold almost all my fabrics and cards despite the fact that I had to leave early because I was getting a cold.   Here's an overall picture of the artwork. Some artwork was on the walls and the three dimensional pieces were displayed on tables.

 Below is the sales table area.

This is the table with my eco print cards in front. There were a lot of colourful items being sold.

These were the piles of my hand dyed and hand printed fabrics.  Only a few weren't sold and I had 30 there!  Apparently people were mailing my fabrics as gifts as far away as England and Malta! Nice to know.