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?

July

As you know, we Fibrecircle girls are often happiest when we’re playing around with dyes and paints and other interesting ways to put pattern onto backgrounds. This month was no exception.

Bev has been doing some rust dyeing, with some bit and pieces she found in her dad’s garage. Basically, she put metal, moisture and fabric or paper together, over time – it doesn’t get easier than that! But the results are great.

These were scraps of silk.

These were heavy watercolour papers.

I think we all would have been quite happy to steal these ones!

This one was an unknown acrylic fabric, which is quite sheer – probably an organza?

Bev was also playing with transfer dyes again. These are Polysol dyes, which are painted onto paper and ironed onto a background. The best effects come from building up layers by ironing on multiple sheets. The background here is watercolour paper, which is an interesting approach. These dyes are more usually used with man-made cloth.

Jan brought along her exhibition name tag, a “tag bag”, which was also created with transfer dyes. It’s beautiful and rich and delicate.

Tricia and Nola have been doing yet more breakdown printing. This time, the screens behaved normally and yielded some interesting prints. This one is Tricia’s:

…and so is this one:

 She envisaged using these as stand-alone prints, which is why she left space around them.
This one really shows the breakdown of the screen.

..and a detail shot of the same one.

Nola printed this cotton piece:

..and this silk scarf

..from the same screen, as it gradually broke down. She had drawn very simple repeat flower elements on the screen with a syringe, which formed a pattern in the corners where the screens met.

She also made a larger one with a clear breakdown effect:

In each case, breakdown occurred fairly quickly, which leaves us with a mystery. Why were there three screens that refused to break down, when all other screens, made in the same way, break down normally? We theorised that perhaps drying the screens with a hair-dryer made them more resistant to breaking down, but these screens were all dried that way. The amount of chemical has been the same, and others made using the same batch behaved normally. The humidity has been variable this winter, but doesn’t seem to correlate in any way. It’s just strange.

Tricia and Nola were also experimenting with discharging some of their dyed cloth, using thiourea dioxide. It’s much milder on cloth than bleach but it’s still a strong chemical, which can affect people in pretty much every way. So good ventilation and proper masks are a must, including during steaming. Here’s Tricia’s experiment:

She painted the thiox onto the cloth randomly with a foam brush, but it's very effective. The interesting thing about this print is that the original fabric was cream, which she printed several times in different colours at the same time. The fabric wasn't dried or batched between prints, yet the thiox only discharged back to an earlier colour layer, not back to the original cream. It's results like this that make the process so interesting!

Nola tried using a print block, which gave very subtle results, as you can see in this closeup:

This process worked much better in areas without a strong colour variation or pattern.

Bev was also doing some sun printing, using ginkgo leaves from a tree in her street.

Sun printing is really such as easy way to get pattern onto cloth. A lot of different media will do this, not just the ones marketed for sun printing, like Pebeo’s Soleil range. Their Setacolor transparent range will also work, as will Jacquard textile paints, Lumiere and Dyn-A-Flow paints. Bev thinks she used Lumiere paints for this one.

Meanwhile, Helen was painting paper with acrylic paints and inks, for a workshop she’s taking. This one was painted with ink first and then with acrylic paints..

…while these were painted with acrylic paint and then with ink.

The first one has quite a dull matte finish, while the others are shiny from the inks. It’s going to be fascinating to see what she does with these!

Nola and Tricia also spent a day dyeing some cloth. Firstly, they set up a couple of dye pots of natural materials and tied some scarves and yarn with string and blocks, tongue depressors and various other Shibori-style methods.

The first dye pot contained wattle, an Australia native flower similar to mimosa. The wattle flowers are only just coming out in Sydney, so the pot contained both flowers and leaves. The result was a less vivid colour than we’d expect just from wattle flowers.

Nola dyed a silk scarf, another scrappy silk skein and some wool yarn. The mordant was copper sulphate, which gives a lovely glossy coppery effect. This is the silk yarn:

Here's the silk scarf, which was bought prepared for dyeing...

... and the wool skein.

In the second pot was bark from ironbark trees. Fibrecircle used this bark back here in November last year, so they knew this would produce a deep chocolate brown, especially if they used ferrous sulphate as the mordant. The pot was very strong with lots of liquid, so they divided it after an hour of boiling, and added copper sulphate to one pot and ferrous sulphate to the second pot. The result was quite different shades. Here are Nola’s results from ironbark and copper sulphate. Here's another PFD silk scarf..

.. some more wool yarn...

... and another wool yarn skein.

Both these colours have a coppery sheen from the copper sulphate mordant and would work very well together.

These are from ironbark and ferrous sulphate, first a wool scarf, tied with wood blocks at the ends...

...and some wool yarn.

After boiling for an hour, the pots were left to cool down overnight with the dyed materials still in them, and then rinsed out.

As you can see, the mordant made a lot of difference to the colour! Nola used the same wool yarn for the second copper sulphate skein and the ferrous sulphate skein – they were wound in succession from the same cone of yarn.

While they were waiting for the results of the eco-dyeing, they used the Drimarene K dyes they’d been using for breakdown printing, using the Four Minute Rapid Fix method from the Batik Oetoro website.

Urea and salt are mixed together with dissolved dye powder in one container, and, at the last minute, this is combined with the appropriate strength of soda ash. The material to be dyed is placed in a plastic bag and the required amount of combined dye liquid is poured over. Tricia and Nola used scarlet and turquoise dye. Nola poured her dye over a neutral Cancer Council hat and over a rather scrappy skein of silk yarn.

The colours were deliberately not mixed, but a mishap with a leaking bag meant more mixing happened than was planned!

After four minutes at the required temperature, the contents were hung on the line to drip dry and then rinsed out gently with warm water and Synthrapol. So easy!

Stay tuned for Tricia’s dyeing results…

We haven’t just been playing around, though. Some of us have actually made things too. Bev created this book with reverse piano hinge binding. It’s a clever kind of binding that allows for extra pages to be added to a book quite easily.

You can see some instructions for this method here, though it looks slightly different to Bev’s book.
The “reverse’ part of the name means the folds holding the pages together are inside the book between the pages; you can also put them on the outside of the book for a different effect. This is a great no-sew method of binding a book.

Helen was working on some rug canvas projects, her absolute favourite pastime. She was finishing off her triptych, which has appeared here and here. She’d been distracted by other things but she was on the homeward stretch now.

Later, Helen was also working on an emperor to go with her soldier here

I love the way he has such a snooty expression!

Here’s a picture of all our sections of the work for the Fragment exhibition in August, displayed together. This isn’t how they’ll be displayed at the exhibition in August, but you can see how they relate to one another.

I guess someone buying the work could frame them like this very easily. From top left to lower right, the works were made by Tricia, Bev, Carol, Maz, Nola and Helen.

Jan is also putting work into this exhibition.

I’ve shown you a teaser of the three works she’s displaying, so you’ll have to come and visit the exhibition to see the full pieces. It’s at the Palm House, Sydney Botanic Gardens, from Thur 16 August to Tues 28 August, with the official opening on Saturday 18 August at 2pm. Come and have a look!

And as always we exchanged postcards. Not many of us had time this month, just Helen…

…from her favourite canvas work...

…and Bev…

… from fabric scraps she printed with Gocco.

See you in August!