Gunnel Hag workshop

A few weekends ago I went to a wonderful workshop with Gunnel Hag.  She taught us her surface design techniques using her own line of fabric pigments, Colour Vie.  I especially enjoyed the flour paste resist and wax resist techniques.  Here is a photo of some of our pieces hanging up to dry.  The colours were vibrant.

Here Gunnel painted over a waxed surface.  The wax was rubbed on like a crayon in this case with a textured surface underneath.

Below is a photo of the flour paste piece I did in the class.  We applied flour paste to a piece of fabric and let it dry in the sun.  We crinkled it up.  We painted over the dried crinkled flour paste, let it dry again and then painted in another colour.  We repeated a few times and rinsed out the flour paste.

Here's another piece I made in the class below.  In this one I painted with a textured surface underneath and then stamped on top with my own rectangular stamp.

Here I used her colours to stamp on a white t-shirt.  I printed with wooden print blocks hand carved in India.

Thanks for having a look!

What I did with the woad

So I finally processed the woad plant a few weeks ago.  It was a long process.  I followed the instructions found at woad.org.uk written by Teresinha.  I'm not sure if I did everything correctly because I ended up with such a tiny amount of dye.  Here are the steps I followed.  In the photo below you can see the woad leaves after I picked and washed them.  This is a very large bowl.

Then I steeped the leaves in water which had been heated to 80 C.  I used reverse osmosis water.  Then you have to quickly cool the steeped leaves by putting the pot into a basin of water to which I added some ice.  See photo below.

After straining the liquid I added the soda ash when it had cooled to 50 degrees C.  The next step was aerating the vat.  This is where I may have gone wrong because I didn't have an electric whisk so I used a hand whisk as hard as I could for ten minutes.  Quite the exercise!  It turned frothy and blue, see below.

Next I poured the liquid into a number of jars and left them undisturbed.  See photo below.  Lots of jars!  The liquid looked greenish at this point.

After leaving the liquid to settle for several hours I siphoned off the top of the jars with a turkey baster and consolidated the contents into two jars and eventually one jar.  The top 2/3 of the jar is siphoned off and fresh water put in several times until the sediment at the bottom starts to look blue.  All of this went well.

However when I finally filtered the last sediment with a piece of hobatai silk there wasn't much there.  I don't know if I siphoned off to much?  I don't think so because I didn't see blue going down the sink.  See photo below to see what I ended up with.  There's a little bit of dark blue dye there that I could scrape off.

So I would say I learned a lot from this process but I'm not sure if I would repeat it because I got so little dye.   It makes me understand how much work went into making natural dyes in the past.  Thanks for stopping by!

Sun printing with Pebeo textile paints

I'm back from the family cottage where I was for a week with my mom.  Like usual I did some sun printing on white cotton fabric so I'll have some items to sell at Fibre Fling next spring. Here's a photo of some fabric in the sun with the plants on them.  I first paint the fabric and then put the plant materials on them usually with some pickling salt.

Here are some of the results on the line afterwards.  The paint dries more quickly around the plant material than under it so it leaves a print where the paint is pulled away.

Here's a close up below of one of the pieces that I quite like.    You can see that the background was also monoprinted before I applied my colour.

Here's my work station where I did my painting.  I was lucky that we had several days of sunny weather. I hope to have some more opportunities this summer to paint outside.

Thanks for having a look!

Eco printing on watercolour paper

Now that summer is here I have more time to devote to my artwork.  I did some printing this week on paper.  The plants in the area are really growing well now so there's lots of colour in them.  I used some of my Tagetes or Tickseed flowers from the garden to get some good prints.  Here are the flowers in the garden.

Here is a set of prints print with these flowers in it.   They're on 9 X 12 inch watercolour paper.  The one on the left has the flowers, some horsetail and wild grapes in it.   The one on the right has some eucalyptus leaves on it that I had frozen last fall.  Yes, the Tickseed flowers turn orange/red when you print them!  This is one of the best reds you can get in this part of the world.  If I lived in a warmer climate where eucalyptus grew it would be easier to get red colours from plants into my eco prints.

 

Here's another set of prints below.  The one on the left is a Buckthorn branch with sumac petals and the one on the right is believe it or not a tulip (faintly visible on the left side).  I added some other leaves and some osage orange flakes.

 

 Here is another set below. In the left print you see the Tickseed flowers.  There's horsetail in the middle and I added some wild grapes.  The print on the right is Blueweed and some asters.  Also some grapes in this one. I froze the wild grapes last fall.  By the way, I haven't yet made anything with the woad because I realized that it would be a very long process and probably I'll get a very small amount of natural blue dye.  But I'm still thinking about it.  Thanks for stopping by!

Woad!

Back in the summer of 2015 my husband and I went to Europe on vacation.  When we were in the countryside in France we met a lady who showed us her herb garden.  She had woad growing there and because I showed an interest she gave me some seeds.  I planted them last spring (2016) and they did grow into a few plants.  I read that you can't use the leaves as dye material until the second season so I brought some plants in for the winter and left one outside in the garden.  The plants I brought into the house died but the plant outside has survived beautifully!  I guess it wasn't a very cold winter because woad isn't supposed to do well here.  Anyways, here is my plant below with the yellow flowers and I'm planning on making some indigo dye out of it.  It seems to be quite a process but I have a video by Michel Garcia and some information and will do my best.  I plan on collecting the seeds again so I could reseed next year.  I love dyeing with natural materials.

Photos from Fibre Fling 6

We had our Fibre Fling 6 show last weekend and we had a good turnout!  Here are some photos from the show.  We had a section of items for sale and a gallery of art pieces.  I sold quite a few pieces of my hand painted fabric and my eco print cards.

Fibre Fling 6!

We're coming close to our next Fibre Fling show on April 7-8 at Kitchissippi United Church in Ottawa (Island Park and the Queensway).  I've been busy making eco print greeting cards for the sales table and will have my one-of-a-kind fat quarters there too.  I'm also working on a new piece to hang up in the gallery area.  Hope you can come! Here's the flyer: