Grown up tie-dye

I love ice-dyeing but had only done scarves and shawls up until recently where I ventured out into socks, fabric (for future sewing/quilting projects) and now a couple of tops for myself.....I think.

I love the way this bronze/brown top turned out and plan on wearing it this coming week. There was no rhyme or reason to how I scrunched it up on the screen for ice-dyeing. Even Sam was taken by how lovely it turned out......

….but he agreed I must have lost my mind when I dyed this one. These are not my colors....at all.  It's pretty but just not me. Will have to give thought as to whether I keep it or try to find someone else it would suit better.....or just wear it around the house and not care that it's too baby blue for my tastes.

In case anyone is interested I bought these tops from Dharma Trading Co.  Great place to find blanks for dyeing - it's where I've always gotten my scarves and shawls to dye. They also have tons of dyes, lots of surface design supplies plus much more. And they have super quick shipping.....for me it's 1-2 days since they're just south of me in California.

I'm in one of those places (in my pee brain) wondering why I bother blogging. I started this blog in 2008 as a way to help promote my handwovens, roving I used to sell and other creations. I don't think it did much promoting as many who follow me are other weavers, spinners and sewers/quilters. I still follow many blogs and enjoy reading them but there are also many that don't post to their blogs anymore, just to Instagram or Facebook. Will give thought to the future but not today.....too much else to do...…..

This & that..........

 I've been doing more ice-dyeing...….it's stacking up waiting for me to do the photography work. I also bought some socks from Dharma to ice-dye. Here are two pair above the ice-dyed rayon/silk devore scarves. They take the dye so well - I love them.  Today I have a batch of 8 pair of socks ice-dyeing along with cotton fabric underneath them to be dyed for whatever projects may come along, mostly probably quilting projects.

 It's that time of year again to make gift bags.  I leave them out on my table to work on here and there when I have a bit of spare time.  I generally take my own bags when grocery shopping but occasionally I open the back of the car and there aren't any in there......so I save the bags to recycle. I wonder if Trader Joe's ever thought this would happen to their bags when they printed 'reusable recyclable' on them.

 Here's one of the finished bags, this is the larger size.  Yes, they aren't beautiful holiday gift bags but I like them. I do still have to hit up the Dollar Store every once in a while when I run out of my homemade bags.

Here are the cows this morning, from left to right - Gwinevere, Stan, Ollie and Moo Latte.  They are not actually staring at me, they're staring at the guy on the roof trying to pull the chimney stack out. Today the new gas fireplace install is happening although we're in a holding pattern waiting for the gas company to arrive to shut off the gas as these guys aren't allowed to touch the main shut off and we don't have a secondary one outside.  Back to the cows. It looks like the piece of property behind us has sold and there will be houses built - it's going to be a sad day when I no longer get to see and talk to the cow gang...…….and I instead hear construction work going on and have houses behind us.

Painted warps

 Yesterday I painted/dyed some warps for future weaving......this morning I rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed them out. Mostly rayon or tencel. The couple of short ones are 5/2 cotton tied in a skein in the perfect size for putting on my inkle loom, I thought it might be fun to inkle weave some painted warps......I'll add some solid colors to them when I warp the inkle loom.  One of the short ones is ikat dyed - holey cow does it ever take a long time to tie those ikat choke ties.....not to mention removing them once it dries.

I had more warps to paint/dye today - here's one just painted ready to have the plastic put over top and rolled up to sit and batch until tomorrow morning when I wash it and the others out. Sometimes I paint a warp for two scarves, like here, sometimes for three scarves. I always vary the wefts so the scarves look a bit different woven up. Me, being in production mode most of the time would love to paint longer warps but I really don't want that many similar colorways for my scarves - I want more one of a kind.

Fun effect

 Recently I asked friend Verna to knit me a blank on her knitting machine so I could experiment with dyeing and weaving it. I forgot to take a pic of it in the dyeing process, I folded it over so it would be a mirror image along the length of it and blended from a grey dye to eggplant. Above is what it looked like after being dyed and washed  - it's all curled up into a tube which will happen being stockinette. I could have wound the warp straight from the knit piece but the last time I did it I was dealing with corkscrews of yarn while trying to thread heddles and reed.........so I wound the knit blank into a skein and wet it to get those curly-q's out of it so it was easier to deal with.

Yesterday I wound the warp and got it on the loom. Here it is underway. I finished the long table runner and it's now sitting in the sink washing, then off on a towel on the deck to dry.  I like the effect although I still see distinct lines of color in the warp.  I've done this technique once before in silk for a scarf and loved it so much I kept the scarf for myself rather than sell it.  This ended up being a table runner because I just pulled a small cone of 5/2 perle cotton off the shelf to give to Verna to knit for me as a test.  I'm going to ask her to knit up some more blanks on her knitting machine but this time in silk and maybe tencel which I'll use for scarves.

Now off to walk Bailey and decide what to do with my day.........so many options........

More silk scarves........

More ice-dyed silk scarves available in my shop

Golf wiffle balls and ice dyeing

Yesterday I tried out something new on two of the silk scarves to be ice dyed. I confiscated 2 packages of golf wiffle balls from the golfer in the house as he doesn't use them for practice.  I then wrapped the scarf over the balls and rubber banded them in place.

Here they are piled with ice and fiber reactive dye.

Here's what they looked like this morning before I patiently removed all the rubber bands and wiffle balls before rinsing the scarves. 

And here are those two scarves.  Kind of a neat effect although looks a little tie dye to me. Will I do this again? Not sure. I know I keep seeing more and more tie dye but not sure that's what I want to dye..........although I do think these are really interesting looking.

The 8 scarves dyed yesterday will be listed in my etsy shop as soon as I have time to edit the photos. Sitting up the ice at the moment are 3 silk shawls and a wound warp of a cotton/rayon blend. Not sure how any of these will turn out - all are experiments that will be rinsed out sometime tomorrow.

Ice dyeing

 It's that time of year again - time to play with ice dyeing. This morning I set up the tables and dye stuffs and painted (with dyes) a knitted blank to use for a warp (hope it turns out) and set up ice dyeing for 8 silk scarves. It's so warm the ice is melting pretty fast.

You can see the silk scarf peaking through in this photo - it's looking like it will be a beautiful scarf.  Always such a surprise to see what I've got the next day when I rinse the scarves out and hang them to dry. I've got more scarves and some shawls to dye, haven't decided if the shawls will be ice dyed or if I'll paint the dyes on like I usually do.  I'm also going to wind a warp and see how that turns out ice dyed - it could turn out incredible or a mottled mess. Will get to that in the next week.

Tissue paper dyeing

I'm currently working on making some samples for a surface design presentation I'm giving in November. I gave this program to my guild back in 2009 so there's much updating of my handout and other than my small samples I have no full size samples so I'm trying to get some done.

I'm not sure why but in my handout I included a bit on tissue paper dyeing silk. It's not really surface design but at the time it seemed like a fun idea. It's not regular tissue paper but Spectra artist bleeding tissue paper. I remember now why I didn't care for it - most of the color washes out. But it's in my handout and I've dyed three scarves so I'll show it - always good to show failures too.

Here's the first scarf - I tore tissue paper into random sizes, placed them on the prewashed scarf and sprayed them with water - they immediately start bleeding.

Here's what I thought would be an Oregon Ducks (college football) scarf.

And the final scarf - you know it's done when the tissue paper dries and starts to pull off easily or if it's breezy it starts blowing all over the driveway.

Look at the pale colors that came out of what were really dark colors before rinsing them. And I rinsed and rinsed and rinsed again using Synthrapol, using laundry detergent. Finally I got them to wash clear - phew what a job. And look at that center scarf - it was the one that should have been yellow and green!  They turned out pretty but not what I envisioned.

I had some small scraps of off white handwoven fabric in my stash so I stenciled on it with Shiva Paintstiks and quilted a couple coffee cozy's.

And this was some leftover warp painted fabric I wove for another project that I stamped leaves on using fabric paints.....makes for a cute little purse.

I've got some other samples I've made recently but would like to make a few more this week.

Ice Dyeing

Here are the 4 scarves ice-dyed yesterday. Carol's are on top - they're stunning.  Mine are on the bottom. My red/orange one dried much lighter and is a coral color now. Lesson learned on that one - if you use a primary color dye, like red, it's going to dominate the scarf where as with other color dyes they are really mixtures of colors so when they ice dye they separate - much more interesting. What doesn't show up in this photo is what the scarves look like close-up - reminds me of marbled paper. We're hoping for snow this winter to try snow dyeing.

One of the chores on the to-do list now is photography of all the scarves dyed this past week - what a time sucker that will be....but first back to working on gifts.......

Ice dyeing

This afternoon neighbor Carol and I did some ice dyeing. Can't wait to see how the scarves turn out after we rinse them tomorrow. Technique is to soak the scarves in soda ash, pile up on some sort of screen (over a bucket to catch the dye drips), pile ice on top, sprinkle with fiber reactive dye and let sit until tomorrow afternoon. The ice was already melting giving us a peek at what's to come.

My first scarf I used bronze and pagoda red - it's hard to see in this picture but the scarf has a very nice autumnal look.

My second scarf I used chartreuse, one of my favorite colors, and indigo - looks like there will be quite a bit of green in this scarf from them mixing.

Unfortunately I can't remember the exact names of the dyes Carol used but this one is one of the grays and I think lilac. It's going to be a stunner.

Carol used the same gray on this plus I think marine but not positive of the color name of the blue.

 

Stay tuned to tomorrow to see the results. I've also got a long sleeve asymmetrical tee from Dharma to dye but just couldn't decide what colors so that will be another day.