More dyeing and postcards

Finally spring is with us, and the weather is warming up. Look at these gorgeous orchids from Tricia’s plant.

It seems to be taking the whole flowering concept to heart, especially as these are only a fraction of the flowers it's producing.
Spring also means better weather for dyeing and other outdoor activities. Tricia and Nola have been doing yet more dyeing with Drimarene-K fibre reactive dyes, using the Four Minute Rapid Dyeing recipe from Batik Oetoro.

Tricia dyed these silk scraps, by folding and clamping and then pouring dye mixture over them. The one in the centre was string-tied.

This silk scarf was gathered randomly and tied with string before dyeing.

This piece of dupioni silk was folded and umbrella’d around a chopstick, and tied.

 The corners are folded in to make a square, and then the corners are folded back the other way to make another square. The chopstick is put in the middle and the folds are arranged evenly and then tied. Doesn’t it create interesting patterns?

 This wool voile was dyed originally with wattle to a pale yellow-beige.

When the yellow and weak turquoise fibre reactive dyes were poured over, the naturally-dyed areas acted as a resist, so those lines have stayed strong. 

Here’s a silk skein, also dyed with weak turquoise and yellow.

It has gorgeous colour variations!

 This piece of silk georgette was eco-dyed beige. When the red fibre reactive dye was poured over, the natural dyeing again acted as a resist.

That's something that has a lot of possibilities. If blocks are clamped on the fabric for eco-dyeing, causing a resist, then those areas will take up dye, if the cloth is later dyed with fibre reactive dyes.

Here’s another one that was originally dyed with natural plant dyes, after Shibori-style stitching.

You can see the pattern of stitching in stripes at the end of the scarf. It was over-dyed with turquoise and yellow fibre reactive dyes, which have picked up the neutral areas of the original dyeing. The colours look muted in the image but it will be a fabulously useful scarf. It looked great against black but it also looked wonderful with other colours, as it was passed around the group.

Nola dyed this silk georgette scarf but she’s not very keen on it. The green is beautiful but the other colours are muddy. She says it will probably be blocked and redyed, or perhaps discharged.

She’s much happier with this silk yarn, which is a gorgeous variegated purple, from pouring over blue and red dye.

This wool yarn is a gorgeous heathery blend of colours.

It was tied around tongue depressors, the ends were dipped into yellow and blue, and then green, blue and yellow dyes were poured over the laid-out skein, keeping the dipped ends out of the dye.

This wool scarf looks almost like it’s been eco-dyed. It's mostly red-brown but it has deep areas of red and blue.

It was loosely gathered up and tied with string, before the dyes were poured over. It really is quite stunning.

 So what did we learn from this process? If true variegation is wanted, dipping works better than pouring. Natural dyes seem to act as a resist to fibre reactive dyes. And, unsurprisingly, a moment's thought about colour theory is useful before dyeing with multiple colours.

As always, we swapped postcards this meeting. For what is probably the first time ever, everyone present had a postcard, and Helen had left one to swap, even though she wasn’t actually with us! Amazing!

Tricia’s postcard was made with transfer dyeing.

She used garden plants, ferns and clover, as the resist and moved them slightly before printing again in a second colour. She added beads and glitz as highlights.

Here’s Helen’s postcard.

She’s used her signature rug canvas, machine stitched, and built up layers with fabric and added a button.

Jan made her first postcard for the group this month.

She used a piece of her gorgeous Shibori-dyed cloth along with her rust-dyed fabric, which she’d used for her alphabet letter work for Pittsburgh. It’s embellished with spun tissue paper and buttons.

Nola made another of her Forest postcards.

It was hand painted in layers of transparent paints.

Maz made a postcard from one of her samples from the workshop she did recently with Effie Mitrofanis, which you saw here.

It really glows, doesn’t it?

Carol made her postcard from a base of painted fusible web.

She added appliqué, beads and other embellishments.

When you look at these postcards, you can really see the kind of work that interests each member of Fibrecircle. We’re all so different!

Last of all, here’s our collaborative work on display at the Fragment exhibition.

It looked great! We were all quite excited to see our work on display.

August

Tricia and Nola did some more eco-dyeing last week. This time, they used ironbark leaves and twigs they collected when a branch came down earlier in the year. They wanted to see if the colour would be significantly different from the colour using the tree bark.

The ironbark pot had a mordant of ferrous sulphate added to it. Nola dyed this length of silk georgette for a scarf, by folding it in a concertina, lengthwise, and folding geranium leaves into the folds, before tying the folds with wood blocks. She added some wooden beads in the centre, twisted but not tied.

Some scented geraniums will leave colour, but these ones did very little.

She also dyed a wool skein, using three tongue depressors, one in the centre of the skein and one each side, tied together…

… and a silk skein, twisted around two tongue depressors, Arashi-style, which were tied together at each end, not touching the yarn.

It has a lovely silvery colour.

In the same pot, Tricia this silk georgette scarf length. 

She folded the silk and tied it with L-shaped blocks of wood. You can just see the corrugated pattern from these wood blocks.

She also dyed this wool voile scarf length.

…which she concertina’d and tucked Grevillea leaves inside the folds. The Grevillea didn’t contribute as much colour as she hoped, but it produced this very delicate pattern.

Tricia had also collected a fallen branch from a tree at the Epping Creative Centre, a couple of weeks ago. She didn’t know what variety the tree was, so it was an experiment. However, it soon became apparent that it wasn’t yielding anything interesting, and the tree was identified as Lemon Scented Gum, Eucalyptus citriodorus. So they added some yarrow leaves, to bring the colour back towards yellow. Nola dyed a silk scarf, tied with slipknots, which gave a very muted result.

She also dyed a wool skein tied with green twine.

This ended up being very interesting because, as well as the resist effect from the twine, it also stained the yarn a muted purple in places.

Her best result was a wool scarf, into which she had tied wooden beads at each end. Although the beads were very dull in colour, they gave the cloth a vivid red colouring on the pale yellow background.

From this dye bath, Tricia had several muted ones that she intends to redye and this gorgeous wool scarf length.

She folded the scarf lengthwise and ironed the folds, before folding the ends on the diagonal and clamping with blocks.

Tricia went on to do some more dyeing during the week. She had some leaves from an unknown tree in her street, which was being trimmed. Unfortunately, these yielded poor colour, so she added some bark to improve the colour and some copper sulphate as mordant. She wanted to try a method she’d seen online, using chopsticks tied umbrella-wise around folded squares.

As the pot wasn’t very dark, it’s a little hard to see but the typical radial pattern from this style of tying is just visible on the silk organza scarf length.

She tied this one with wood blocks, by folding and pressing lengthwise and then folding the ends into triangles. The diamond shaped wood blocks did the rest. The pattern looks like patchwork stars. You can see how readily wool takes the colour by this method, as the colour is much richer.

This silk georgette scarf length was stitched in rows of running stitch at each end before dyeing.

She tied wooden beads into the ends of this wool scarf length, as Nola did, but although the pattern is the same, she didn’t get the same bright colours from those beads.

It was probably one of those serendipitous events, never to be repeated.

Tricia has been very busy creatively. She also attended an ATASDA workshop with Effie Mitrofanis. Effie’s work is very intensively hand embroidered, giving a very rich and complex result. Here are some pieces that Tricia made.

This one shows the backgrounds that Effie had students make before the class.

In the class, the backgrounds were stitched by hand in all sorts of interesting ways.

On this one, she used bullion stitch, beading, herringbone stitch and seed stitch.

This one has thread beads, double blanket stitch and scattered straight stitch.

Here are some cords that Effie taught the class to make, by wrapping cords made of embroidery floss and adding beads and other embellishments.

 

Tricia was working on this one at the Fibrecircle meeting.

It has beading and cross stitch, among other things.

 Maz also attended the same workshop and here are her pieces of work.

This one has beading, straight stitch, French knots and herringbone stitch...

...while this one has herringbone, French knots and long & short stitch.

Maz found she enjoyed using the long and short stitch as an interesting edge, which looks quite different to the more usual blanket stitch.

This one is still under construction, and so far has white ruched fabric, some stitching and beads...

Bev was working on her individual work for the Fragment exhibition at the Palm House.

She was inspired by medieval manuscripts, and particularly by the Fadden More Psalter, a psalter recovered in 2006 from an Irish bog. It's slowly being reconstructed, piece by piece. Psalters were volumes containing the Book of Psalms and often other devotional material as well, which were owned by wealthy lay persons in the Middle Ages. It's amazing to think of a book surviving almost a thousand years!
Nola was painting on her latest postcard. It's from the Forest series like her last two and she is building up layers of colour using transparent paints.

Stay tuned for more fun stuff! We seem to be in a very creative mood at present.

Tricia's dyeing

As we promised, here are Tricia's pieces from her eco-dyeing and fibre reactive dyeing experiments with Nola.

First, the eco-dyeing. The first pot contained wattle, a variety with very delicate flowers, so both flowers and leaves were used. The pot was yellow but not bright yellow. Tricia dyed a silk skein, with very limited results, and this wool scarf, which she'd clamped with blocks.

The second pot contained the bark of Ironbark, Eucalyptus sideroxylon and was divided into two, one with copper sulphate as a mordant and one with ferrous sulphate. In the Ironbark and copper sulphate, she dyed some more silk yarn and this wool scarf, which she tied with green twine.

In the ironbark and ferrous sulphate, she dyed some wool yarn and these silk scraps, which were wrapped through CDs.

While these were boiling away, she used some Drimarene-K dyes to dye this scarf...

... and these silk scraps.

They're brilliant, aren't they?