Gradations and a tee.

It’s been a while since I last posted but I’ve been on a reading jag for the last month or so. My daughter passed on the twilight series and then I went on from there.

I bought some baby onsies and toddler t-shirts to tie dye and decided that since I needed some more lemon yellow to go ahead and order a few extra baby colours as well.

I have four gradations below:

Baby blue > Wisteria > Baby pink > Seafoam all from Dharma. Colour corrected with Photoshop because they were so pale. The pink is a bit to intense at the darkest level and the Wisteria is a very subtle blue with a hint of purple in it. This is a colour that might do better at a more intense level.

The colours are pretty light to start off with so it was somewhat of a waste to do a six level gradation with them but I’m glad I did the gradation because I like the baby pink and blue at a less intense colour. The only problem being that a tee-shirt usually does better with a more saturated dye as it’s thicker material so I’ll probably go with the darkest shade and see how that turns out. I thought the Wisteria would be more purple but I was confusing this colour with the samples of ProChem’s wisteria.

I have been doing crafts but they are all things that I’ve done before so I haven’t posted them but I did do a tie-dye tee for my son’s girlfriend so thought I’d post that as well:

Basic turquoise, fuchsia and lemon yellow.

Karen

All Things Bright and Beautiful…more spirals.

I finished doing the spirals for my June spiral swap yesterday. It’s finicky working with small pieces of fabric – about 11″ x 14″. I used tweezers to grab the middle of the fabric so I could turn it and then held the fabric with elastic bands instead of doing it in the bowl like last time. The result was a tighter spiral. I also for the most part used a few 10ml syringes to apply the dye. I had better control but it took forever to keep filling them up and using them. All done though and here are the results:

Spirals.

More spirals

Final yellow and golden yellow spiral.

And then from my garden:

Just to prove that I did indeed get some berries from the garden this year. A mad fight with the chipmunks to see who gets the ripe ones first.

Karen

Colour Wheels Mounted

I spent a good chunk of yesterday mounting some colour wheels I had done from a colour study last year onto paper. Most of the girls in my group use card stock but I have to admit that I just use paper. One of the girls in the forum had created a really neat file for mounting these wheels and I started off using her form for the first wheel but basically I’m a lazy writer and wanted to type in my information so I ended up creating a new document in Word, which turned out easier than I expected. The original form was pdf and I don’t have adobe so had to create a new doc file using Word.

Susan’s idea was to attach iron-on adhesive to each square and then iron the colour wheel onto the paper/cardstock. Wonderful idea and it works brilliantly. I started off using some “steam a seam 2″ but ended up with “heat and bond” for no other reason than the “steam a seam 2″ cost major bucks. I’d bought some of this at the fabric store with a 50% off coupon but even then it still cost over $6 a metre (Needless to say it sells for $4 in the States without the 50% off.). The heat and bond was still expensive but at 50% off was the same price for 3 yards and it was wider. I’m sure it’s less expensive in the states as well. Needless to say I found the “heat and bond” after the clerk had already cut the more expensive stuff.

Anyhow they both worked well but I have to admit that if you’re into applique the “steam a seam 2″ is fantastic stuff. It’s tacky on both sides so that you can stick your fabric to it and if you don’t like where you’ve positioned your piece then you can lift it off and reposition, wonderful stuff but expensive.

Here are some photos I took of the colour wheels, unfortunately they didn’t turn out all that great I don’t know why. I tried to adjust the lighting but they still turned out on the dark side, my lack of camera expertise I guess.

Colour wheel assortment I did using fuchsia, cobalt and golden yellow. The dark, medium and light value colour wheels are on the top and the three colour wheels on the bottom are dark, medium and light as well but with black, brown and grey additives.

Dark colour wheel closeup.

Light colour wheel closeup.

Light colour wheel with grey additive using old form.

I was hoping to get all of my colour wheels done yesterday, big joke as I managed to mount 18 out of the 55 wheels that I have. Could be a long process.

Karen

More Amish Diamond Squares

I finally got around to finishing some of the Amish Diamond squares for the block swap I’m participating in for the month of July.

The colours used are Jaquard ultra violet, Dharma ivory (at more then the recommended strength), Prochem’s boysenberry and the green is one I made myself mixing lemon yellow and one of the blues I have, can’t remember which. The black is Kona black.

Amish Diamond squares.

I had participated in this swap last October but there weren’t that many people so our group decided to repeat the swap. Hopefully with these additional squares I’ll be able to make a small quilt. If I don’t have enough then I’ll just raid my stash and make some more. I might just do that to colour balance what squares I end up with.

Karen

18-step Colour Wheels

I’ve been busy doing stuff like gardening and reading and fabric dyeing over the last little bit, nothing to really blog about but I thought that I would post a couple of pictures of two colour wheels that I recently did.

I drew inspiration for the colour choices from the ProChem website and their gradation kits. I didn’t follow their instructions for the 30-step gradation but rather did an 18-step colour wheel using fat eighths and my own dye formulas so the colours I ended up with were slightly different than those pictured on the site.

The first colour wheel I did was called Flower Garden:

Sapphire – Boysenberry – Tangerine

The second colour wheel is called Autumn Blends:

Turkey Red – Butterscotch – Olive

The Flower Garden wheel used full strength dye so the colours were quite intense. For the Autumn Blends wheel I backed off and used 2 tsp of dye per cup and a half of water. I was happy with both of the colour wheels but I’d already done several jewel tone wheels before so the Autumn Blends turned out to be my favorite this time around. The wheel really does remind me of the mix of leaves that you see in autumn – yellows, reds, oranges, greeny browns, browns and reddish browns – very nice.

Karen

Over-Under Complex Cloth

I have a upcoming swap due this month for my Dyehards group and the theme is Over-Under. I’ve never done this type of complex cloth before so it was a new learning experience for me and since everything turned out quite well I’m pleased.

I drew a lot of inspiration from Ann Johnston’s book “Color by Design” so if you’re interested in this type of fabric dyeing I strongly encourage you to buy her book as it’s all there, a little powerhouse of a book.

I have to admit that after sternly telling myself to take pictures of the steps along the way I got caught up in the process and didn’t so what I have are the finished products and I’ll explain what I did to get there.

I used dry soda-soaked fabric as my base and then added thickened dyes to the fabric to create my pieces. The thickened dye was dye concentrate mixed with print paste.

The table that I work on isn’t large enough to hold a 44″ piece of fabric so I took the one yard and divided it into two managable pieces. First I taped plastic to protect the table and then I took a piece of large-sized bubble wrap I found in the garage and taped that on top of the plastic. I had some debate as to whether I should put the thickened dye on top of the bubbles or lay the fabric on top and roll the dye over the fabric. I decided to roll the dye on top of the fabric because cleanup would be easier.

Look closely and you can see golden yellow circles in the background. In her book Ann mentioned that the grid on the paint tray will indent the foam roller if you press hard enough so I tried this out with the fuchsia dye and it works really well, I was surprised so if you look at the fuchsia you can see some cross-hatch marks.

Next I took an old stencil and used some thickened black to make the flowers. I started off using a foam brush put it pushed the dye under the cutout and was blobby so I took a rounded pouncing foam brush and made up and down dabs, much better.

This second piece was much the same as the first but this time I took a rubber stamp, the Japanese symbol for love, and using the circular foam brush I tapped black dye on it and stamped in various locations all over the fabric.

There seemed to be a lot of white space on the fabric so I took a sea sponge and lightly dipped it into the black and gently sponged all over the piece to give it more texture.

The pieces were fairly dry at this point so I covered them up but was worried that they wouldn’t stay damp even though I know that the urea will work to keep the fabric moist for the dye to bond. Anyhow I gave into impulse and several hours later ended up lightly misting the two pieces with water, something I regretted as a couple of hours later when I checked the black had begun to diffuse and I lost the sharp edges of my designs.

Not to worry though because in the washout the crispness was restored so I have a feeling that adding the water several hours later didn’t really do anything for the fabric because the dye had bonded by that time anyhow. Next time I won’t mist and I’ll only work on one piece at a time so the fabric will be fairly damp by the time I cover it.

Karen

Bernat Handicrafter Tote.

Well another project finished. I started this project back at the beginning of February and then as usual with my projects it got put by the wayside as something else caught my interest. It only took a month and a half to finish so that’s not to bad.

Bernat Handicrafter Tote in English Lavender.

The thing that’s really neat about this tote is that I dyed the lining and cord to match the crochet cotton. It really tickles my fancy that I have the ability now to do this. No more mad searching for just the right colour at the fabric stores. Just pop out my swatch book and look for a match.

Inside matching lining and cord dyed with ProChem’s Lavender Mist.

Now on to the next unfinished project….

Karen

Ruching

I am hostessing a ruching swap this month and thought I’d post some pictures of the process or at least the process I did as I’m sure there are several ways to do this.

The idea behind ruching is to take a piece of fabric and roll it around a length of cord or string and then gather up the material and tie off the ends. You then apply the dye, let it batch 24 hours and then wash out the fabric. If you’ve compressed the material enough the compression will provide a resist of sorts.

Half a yard of fabric and nylon cord.

Starting to roll the fabric around the cord.

After I was done rolling the fabric I pinned the edges so they wouldn’t pop open when I started to gather the material.

Its helpful to tie off one end of the cord to a chair to help me with compressing the fabric as it was quite bulky having used a half yard.

The two ends tied off together.

Using left-over dyes from the snow-dyeing sessions to dye the donuts.

Grecian rose and golden yellow, done in strips because I didn’t have enough of either dye to do an entire donut.

Closeup of the ruching I used a bit to much of the yellow and the white didn’t show as well with that colour.

Lavender Mist.

Closeup of the lavender it made a really neat pattern.

Finally one last picture of snow-dye that I did before the snow all melted. I did this with regular strength dyes as I was going for a more pastel looking piece.

Colbalt and Grecian Rose.

Karen

Finished Cottage Tote and More Snowdyes…

I finally got around to finishing up the “Cottage Tote” bag I started the end of January and I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. The only big snag was self-inflicted at about 11:00 p.m. when I put the zipper in wrong side to right side, lol, I decided to make it a night at that point.

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

Back of bag using hand-dyed fabric received from my secret sister swap. The blue, yellow and green on the front of the tote was also from this swap. The pink and light blue was from my own stash.

Inside of the bag. The fabric is a snow-dyed piece I recently did.

Zipper closure with a pale boysenberry snow-dye.

The bag is going to a lady I know at church. Her favorite colours are yellow and blue. She’s a musician, songwriter and author so every time I see her she’s got an armload of papers/music sheets so hopefully this will help. The bag is quite roomy.

We had warmer temperatures the last few days and rain so I dashed outside wanting to do a couple of pieces of snowdye before it melted. One of my forum friends had sent me some coral to experiment with and the idea was to try and make some clouds with a hint of coral. Well long story short I forgot to do the big blotch pattern on the first piece and I used the wrong blue. I used cerulean blue and probably should have gone with the mixing blue.

Cerulean blue and Coral in a plaid configuration. The snow was from underneath and granular.

Cerulean blue and Coral, bit of a purple cast to it.

So I thought that I’d try again only this time use less of a concentration of the coral and then do the pattern in bigger blobs. Lately I’ve been working with lavender mist so I thought that would do nicely as well. It was raining outside when I got the snow this time.

Globs of cerulean blue and coral with lavender mist in between.

Cerulean blue, coral and lavender mist.

The first piece had more of a purple cast to it which was surprising given that I used the lavender mist in the second piece but I figure it had more to do with the coral being stronger and the pattern layout. The blue and coral had a better chance of interacting. The blotches of colour were smaller in this piece.

Nice pieces, I used half the strength of coral dye in the second piece but it doesn’t really look like I did. No big fluffy clouds this time around, more like peonies in blue. Might be interesting to try again but have the flowers in a bed of green.

Karen

So Cool

Just a quick picture I thought I’d share of some material that I dyed to match some Handicrafter Cotton that I’d crocheted for a tote. This is a simple tote bag that I’m working on and I’m going to put a lining in it so items won’t fall out through the holes.

Bernat Handicrafter cotton – English Lavender and Hand-dyed fabric – Lavender Mist by ProChem. (I swear I didn’t know the names before I typed them out, lol)

The thing that I find is so “cool” is that I now have the knowledge to go grab my swatch book and match colours to objects that I am making. No more being limited by what the fabric store has to offer.

Karen