Winter

There’s nothing much new happening around here. I’m still working on my Granny afghan in my spare time between bouts of reading and computer. I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of the snow we’ve been getting here in Whitby, Ontario, Canada.

Looking out the front window.

Looking out the back window.

The deck with bird feeder.

I have a friend coming over today and we’re going to be working on a quilt/duvet/doona cover for her daughter who is going back to Australia next week. I have my new MegaQuilter sewing macine so I thought that two people are faster than one so hopefully it will get done quicker with one person sewing while the other is ironing and assembling the pieces.

Meanwhile since I hadn’t tested out the machine I thought that maybe I should and worked on this little project yesterday.

Cottage tote from the book “Quilted Bags and Totes” by Denise Clason.

This is just the front panel of the bag. I used print fabrics for the block and hand-dyes for the strips that I received in my secret sister swap. I’ll post more pictures when I get the bag done.

Karen

More Snowdyes continued…

Here are some pictures of the fabric I dyed the other day. My last post showed the fabric as it was being dyed and these pictures were taken after the washout and ironing.

Boysenberry snowdye, hoffman lawn. I’m somewhat disappointed with how this turned out. Kind of weird speckling of the dye. I did add some more dye after but I don’t think these spots come from that. The bit of blue dye powder didn’t really affect the boysenberry that much, I guess I needed to use more of it.

Lemon yellow and mixing blue the over-all spatter pattern. Nice muted piece of fabric like a spring green almost.

Lemon yellow and mixing blue with the larger blob pattern (see last post). This was the star of the three, fantastic piece of material. Fabric like this draws you back to dyeing, having you trying to obtain this result. It really looks good in person. The fabric gives me an idea of trying the same technique but with just the blue to try and create some fluffy clouds.

The last couple of pictures are some material that I just received in the mail from Thousands of Bolts. These two fabric are from Kona Bay fabrics. You can order six yards in the priority envelope and that’s what I did. I was thinking of using the floral for a quilt backing, it wasn’t until after the order I realised that all six yards should have been floral and not the four I ordered. I guess I’ll have to get creative and use the other matching two yards as well in the backing.

Kona Bay fabric, it has some gold metallic in it.

Close-up of flowers. I have a weakness for the Kona Bay line of fabrics.

Karen

More Snowdyes…

Well we had a nice fluffy snowfall the other day so I did a few more snowdyes. They are batching right now but I thought I’d post some of the before pictures and then I’ll post the fabric after it’s been washed and ironed.

Dharma’s Lemon Yellow and ProChem’s Mixing blue.

After snow melt.

Lemon Yellow and Mixing Blue but in a more intense pattern.

Whoops, to much yellow, it’s gone right through the snow to the fabric.

After snow melt.

ProChem’s Boysenberry with a sprinkle of mixing blue powder.

After snow melt.

I have to admit that when I checked on the boysenberry piece I noticed that there were some white spots sprinkled throughout the piece. Since there were only a few and they were very random I took some left-over dye and covered them up so we’ll see how it washes out.

The two pieces of lemon yellow and mixing blue were an experiment to see what difference the dye pattern would make when the snow melted. It’s very noticable and I haven’t spread it out so we’ll see how it goes, always a surprise.

After I squirted on the yellow for the second piece I noticed that it went right through the layer of snow directly onto the fabric and I was worried that I’d have these very intense yellow spots but they seem to have diffused somewhat.

Karen

I’ve Been Tagged…

I’ve been tagged and this is a new one for me. Judy tagged me and the rules are that you go to your fourth folder in your pictures and pick out the fourth picture.

I did that curious as what was there but found I only had two pictures besides which this is a crafting blog for the most part so I went to my fourth folder of blog pictures and this is the fourth picture:

This is a close-up shot of one of the five scarves I made for the bridesmaids for my daughter’s wedding. The seedbeads were a blue montanna with a jet black bead inbetween. It took forever to make these and part of the reason I’m fatter today as I spent to much time working on wedding crafts instead of going outside and exercising like I should. LOL, or at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking by it.

The next four people I’d like to tag are:
Catherine – http://calidore.wordpress.com/
Thelma – http://thelmassewnthings.blogspot.com/
Michelle – http://stitchandpaint.blogspot.com/
Tracy – http://tracyborders.blogspot.com/

These are all wonderful girls who have fantastic blogs so go have a peek at their work.

Karen

More snowdyes…

A few more picture of some snow dyes. The first set is an experiment I did with some left-over scraps. It didn’t work out very well because the pieces of material were so small I couldn’t really tell whether or not the snow made an effect on the dyeing.

Starting to layer the snow and material

Snow layered with navy blue and golden yellow.

Flipping jar upside down in sink.

Snow melted off.

Material dyed and ironed.

The samples turned out quite light and some of the fabric was from Walmart and didn’t take the dye as nicely as the P&B. The darker pieces were those on the bottom of the jar where the dye pooled.

I did another piece of P&B yesterday using up the left-over Navy Blue from Dharma. I did this in the bathtub on a large lid so I spread out the fabric as well as I could instead of scrunching it. I figured that there would be more globs to it but instead it ended up with more creases. I can’t really explain it because unless you’ve compared a piece of snow-dye to parfait container fabric you won’t know what I mean. Let’s just say it didn’t turn out how I envisioned but part of that could be that the dye pooled on the large lid rather than running off. The piece looked dark so I didn’t batch it that long, about eight hours. As it turns out it dried lighter than expected and did have a bit of a purple cast but not much.

Dharma’s navy blue, snowdye.

Lastly here is a picture of the granny squares that I have finished so far. I needed to spread them out to get an idea of how big the afghan would be. It’s about 11 rows by 12 rows. I’m not sure whether or not to make it square or to make it slightly rectangular.

Karen

Snow Dyeing Tutorial and Grannyland…

Well I haven’t posted much over the last week or so as I’ve been off in grannyland. After organizing the closet and seeing all of the leftover bits of yarn I decided that I’d whip up a couple of granny square afghans. Did I say whip up? Make that a slow and steady slog and maybe it’ll only be one afghan at present. I must admit though I have finished off several of the left-over balls of yarn.

A work in progress, 127 squares shown finished and in the process of being finished. Not sure how many more I’ll need, I’ll have to lay them out on the bed.

I went to see AC/DC in November at the Rogers Centre. I ‘d only gotten one ticket for that show but they put on another show January 9th and I managed to get six tickets for that one – two single floor seats and four together up in the 500 nosebleed level. I won’t go into describing this show as it was the same as I the one I blogged last time except to say there was a comment left in my blog about the cartoon at the opening of the act being a bit racy. I hadn’t noticed because I was too busy trying to operate my cell phone. LOL, whatcha talking about? Yes to whomever blogged, you’re right it was a bit cheeky. Fantastic show made only better by the fact that I was eleven rows back dead centre this time. Hey I could actually see the expressions on the band’s faces this time around.

Anyhow I did sneak in my camera – said camera not being as good as some of the new iphones but I did catch two (yes count two) pictures that weren’t a disaster and some fairly good movie clips which I won’t show as I’m too chicken to risk copyright infringement but I will show you this picture

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Rosie! If you’re a fan you’ll know who she is, enough said.

Well I got a little stir crazy from sitting around crocheting all the granny squares so I took a break and decided to do some snow-dyeing for an upcoming swap I’m hosting for my fabric dyeing forum. I’ve done a series of photos like a tutorial which I’ll post below.

Snow and dye ready to go.

Arranging material onto a rack in laundry tub.

Layering snow on top of material.

Adding the first dye – Boysenberry from ProChem.

Adding the second dye – Golden Yellow from ProChem.

Adding the third dye – Cerulean Blue from Dharma.

Dye starting to melt.

And melting…

And melted.

Washed and ironed piece of fabric. This was a left-over piece of fabric that I had sitting around. I can’t remember but it’s either P&B’s 108″ dyer’s cloth or it’s the PFD 108″ from Marshall. Nothing wrong with the fabric but the extra-wides don’t produce quite the same sharpness as the 45″ material.

This picture shows a corner of the fabric where the material was more exposed and had less snow on it so less blending of colours.

This is the second piece of fabric that I did for the swap using the standard 45″ wide P&B. I used more dye on this especially the Boysenberry and it’s reflected by having a more purple-red cast to it. This was done the next day and we’d had warmer tempratures and the snow was starting to melt and compact. It was very hard to work with the snow (fluffy is easiest) so what I did was to take a plastic lid and press the snow into the lid and then flip it over on top of the material. I didn’t layer as much snow because I was trying to get a more intense colour. I think that is the reason I had globs of colour throughout the piece. I’m thinking the dye broke through the thinner areas of snow. All in all I actually like the colours on the first piece of material better.

I also did an experiment with a jar and smaller pieces of fabric I had. I took the snow and fabric and layered them in the jar but I’ll post that another day as the pieces really weren’t that big and the whole thing didn’t work out as well but I feel it’s worth showing if only to show what you get from a failed experiment.

Karen

Christmas Tree Skirt Backing – Mandala

I finally got around to dyeing the backing for my tree skirt yesterday. I decided to try out a Mandala so tied it up and dyed it in two shades of bronze. It’s not bad, not good but not bad for the effort involved in it. I have a series of photos below and will explain as I go.

This is the tied up mandala. Unfortunately I didn’t clue in to the picture taking until after I’d tied it up. Oh well there are seminars online if you want to know the folding technique.

The fabric was wide PFD backing and I tied it into a 16-point mandala so it was pretty thick material at this point. Most tie-dyers use rayon or silk to do their mandalas because material this thick is hard to fold and hard to get the dye to penetrate the thick layers.

Placing the mandala on a large plastic lid to prevent spills from the dye.

Here are some yorker bottles with elastic bands around the tops to prevent leaking, hopeless cause, I really dislike yorker bottles but needed them because they hold a lot of dye.

Starting to apply the dye in two various shades of bronze using alternating bands.

More bands of colour.

Cleaning drips of dye before flipping over the mandala.

The flipped mandala prior to applying matching bands of bronze dye.

Covering the plastic lid with a garbage bag and plastic bag. Normally I batch inside the container but the container to this lid was full of stuff and I couldn’t be bothered to take it out. I batched the mandala for 24 hours.

The sinew is snipped off and I’m starting to open the mandala. When I apply the dye it’s a difficult balance between applying enough dye to penetrate the layers but leaving a little white to contrast with the colour. For this mandala I applied about two cups of dye.

Lots of white starting to show, more than I expected.

Open about half way.

Wet mandala before washout, hmm…pretty dark but it will lighten up. The question is how much will it lighten up?

All right who is that and why is she in my photo?

My photographer was out to lunch as the idea was to catch the centre of the mandala, oh well. As you can see it did lighten quite a bit. It was a rough job at tying up the mandala because it was so thick. I couldn’t be bothered to take the time because it was only backing for the Christmas tree skirt and the reality is that it will be pulled out once a year and nobody will look at the backing anyway. It’s not to bad for a rush job.

The thing that bothered me about this piece of fabric is that I didn’t take into account how wide it was in relation to the mandala that I tied. If I had been thinking I would have squared it off a bit more. As the piece stands now I either whack off a piece of material at either end to fit the tree skirt or I chop the mandala pattern in half to save fabric. I will be chopping off the end pieces and try to use them in another project.

There was a lot of white showing on the ends but I kind of like the blotchiness of it. The pieces I cut off might turn into some neat complex cloth if I ever take the time to work on them.

Karen