Rice Bag

I’ve not been doing much of anything lately, well I guess that’s not true, lots of stuff but most of it boring normal everyday stuff. I got in an order of books from Amazon so I’ve been on a bit of a reading jag.

John’s aunt passed away this past week so Saturday saw us attending the funeral. The kids stayed home because they’ve only really seen this aunt a couple of times besides which our Thanksgiving dinner was on Saturday so I had the pleasure of coming home to dinner already prepared for me by the girls. This was great because really I didn’t feel all that well what with being up half the night with TMJ (jaw pain) and a massive headache.

One of the girls in my fabric dyeing forum mentioned using a rice bag on her jaw that she made out of flannel material so I thought I’d give it a go. I made the bag that held the rice out of cotton and then made a slipcover out of flannel to go over top.

Cotton bag filled with rice.

Rice bag with removable flannel cover.

We’ve had some fantastic weather for the holiday weekend and I should have been out doing the final gardening chores but admit that I just didn’t get around to it between playing games and talking with the kids. I did end up doing some cleaning today so all was not lost. Tomorrow is a holiday as well so we’ll see what can be acomplished. I guess it sounds weird to be working on the days off but nothing seems to get done on the week days so you make time where you can.

Karen

Amish Diamond blocks

The latest project that I’ve been working is the Fall Block Swap with my fabric dyeing forum group. This block – Amish Diamond – is based on a pattern from quilterscache.com. It’s a fairly basic block which is what our group wanted since we would be sewing quite a few of them. The block is based on three colours, one of which is the standard Amish black.

The idea is to pick two different colour combos and then swap out a block of each combination to every person participating in the swap. This current crop of members seems to be a bit on the tentative side so we only had six people sign up for the block so I had to come up with 12 blocks. Given I’ve been trying to find time to do them in the past four days, I’m kind of glad only six signed up.

Anyhow here are the two colours combos that I chose.

Amish diamond - Navy blue, Pagoda Red

Amish Diamond - Olive, Butterscotch

The navy blue was Dharma and the other colours from ProChem, the black was Kona black. Kona black was chosen as the standard so that when all the different blocks come together the blacks should match fairly closely given dye lots.

I was going to choose purple but when I went through my fabric samples somehow these colours looked good together. Maybe because it’s fall I was influenced by my colour choice. It should be interesting to get all the other blocks back and see how the quilt turns out. These blocks are a good way to use up smaller pieces of fabric so I’ll be going back to the stash to see what I need to finish the quilt.

Karen

Marbles continued…

Well I did the washout today and the material came out sort of how I expected.

Final step.

The purple wasn’t as intense as I’d like, in fact I’m not too sure exactly what it is. I re-applied some of the mixing red to the marbles so there are some spots that are more reddish in the background than others. I do have some purple spots and the rest is well I don’t really know.

The thing that I found interesting was that the circles of yellow were for the most part subdued. There are some really yellow circles but for the most part they are a mix of the yellow, red and purple. This surprised me because I applied the rubber bands fairly tightly and I had a good 1/4″ or more of elastic covering the fabric so you’d think there would have been more of a resist. I think if I hadn’t re-applied the red I wouldn’t have covered up the yellow so much.

All in all, it’s an interesting material. I’m not sure what it can be used for but since I’m swapping most of it away…hey…it’s not my problem.

Karen

Marbles

Well the wedding is over and everything went wonderfully. Jen and Phil made a beautiful bride and groom. I’ll post pictures when I get them. Jen had a photographer and we had a friend of the family taking pictures so I didn’t even try as I didn’t want to spoil the day having to worry about that part of it. What a mad run around though. I made the church five minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start (well before the bride). Truly a scramble trying to get there but more of that later.

I have a September swap that needs to get done but because of the wedding I’m running a bit behind. I’m almost done, just the washout tomorrow after it batches overnight but I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of the process just so I could have something to blog about.

The first part of getting the material ready was to dye it Dharma’s lemon yellow – MX-8G. This is truely an almost neon type of yellow. To bright for my taste but it does give some neat results depending on what you use it for.

The next step was to wrap the fabric around some glass marbles and tie them off with rubber bands. I started out with the flat type of marbles that people use in aquariums and vases but I ran out after two bags so then switched to round marbles.

Marbles in cloth held in place with rubber bands.

The idea of tying off the marbles is to create a resist with the rubber bands. I’ve done this before. What I did last time was to just plunk the whole thing down into a vase and fill it with dye. When the piece came out and the rubber bands removed I had a purple piece of cloth with rough circles of the resisted colour. This time around I wanted to try dyeing the top of the marbles one colour and the background another.

I decided the easiest way to do this was to set the piece of cloth onto a plastic lid and apply the dye. As I was arranging the material I realised that it wasn’t going to work exactly as I’d imagined. Somehow I pictured in my mind applying the dye to the top of the marble and then squirting dye onto the fabric below the marble. This is all good but what I didn’t think of was how do you prevent hundreds of marbles from touching each other and the underlying fabric? Anyhow I tried standing the marbles up as best I could.

Fabric placed on a plastic lid with marbles on top as best I could.

Next I applied mixing red MX-5B to the tops of the marbles.

Marble tops applied with mixing red MX-5B

After applying the red I put purple on the background fabric. The purple is one I created from a mixture of the mixing red and colbalt, it’s a nice deep purple but I’m not sure what it will look like when it hits the yellow.

Purple dye applied to the fabric background.

I re-applied a bit more of the red to the tops of the marbles to try and re-inforce the colour as the purple did hit the tops somewhat. It should be interesting to see how it all washes out. I’ve used the lemon yellow and purple before and because the yellow looks almost neon it does some neat things to the purple but having said that I don’t think I’ve used this colour of purple with the yellow so we’ll see. Also the purple is not as saturated as it was when I did the low water immersion piece, it might not be that purple. I figured the tops of the marbles would turn out an orange colour because red and yellow give orange but who knows. Regardless, I’ll have yellow rings on the fabric from the rubberband resist.

Karen

Swarovski Bracelet

Well I have four days to go until the wedding. I have been busy doing various stuff getting ready running around doing chores. Just thought I would post a picture of a bracelet I made from one of the local bead shops in town.

Swarovski crystal bracelet in moonlight and black diamond.

Same bracelet I like to wear them loose.

I ended up making two of these. The first one I had made for myself but it went so well with my daughter’s wedding dress and she liked it that I made another one. The second has a nicer clasp on it and the wire is softer so it drapes a bit better.

It was hard to get the shiney bling bling in the photos but its very sparkly so I guess thats a good thing

Karen

Batik Fish Pillow

One of my fabric dyeing forums recently had a resist swap where participating members traded in fat eights of their favorite resist method and one of the pieces I received back was a beautiful piece of batik that the owner had created in a workshop she’d done this year.

Needless to say I was flabbergasted to get such a beautiful piece of fabric and I immediately wanted to do something with it. I have to admit this is probably the first time that I’ve ever had the urge to create something right away with a piece of material I’ve gotten. Usually I get ideas but put them off but this one I had to do something with. It just screamed pillow to me and that’s what I did.

My house has limited wall-space as it’s very open and I wanted to make something that could be seen by any visitors so the pillow seemed a logical choice. I got lucky in picking out the matching fabric and cording from the local Walmart that was closing down their fabric department so I probably paid less than five dollars, which made me happy.

Batik fish pillow

Pillow on couch in family room. Kitty wondering why mom is disturbing his sleep with flashing camera lights.

Much thanks to Kathy for sharing her marvellous creation.

Karen

Just a quick post…

To say hello and post a link my son sent me. I’m kinda stoked about it because some of my fabric made it on TV. If any of you have been following my blog then you’ve seen the pictures I’ve recently posted of my son’s redsuit. (Somewhat redundant as I guess the pictures are just below – has it been that long since I last posted, seems like forever)

CHCH News clip

The pants do look good if I do say so myself.

Karen

Back to school and the Redsuit

Well it’s back to uni for the boys, which is exciting for them and for me. The one son got accepted into the redsuits – an engineering group or fraturnity I guess you’d call it. The various faculties around campus have them and engineering’s colours are bright red. The symbol is the fireball lol, and the drink some type of fireball whisky etc, you get the picture. Part of Dan’s duties this saturday is to help welcome the new frosh to campus and help them move into residence so he left last night.

Part of the redsuit is to decorate it as the various members see fit so since his nickname given by the fraturnity or group (still not sure what it is) had something to do with pockets (not sure I’m supposed to put it out there what the whole name is) I thought it might be neat to come up with some extra pockets for the suit.

As it turned out I ran out of time since I didn’t realise I was going to end up doing this until a couple days before and I was bound and bent I was going to finish off the last of the beaded scarves and I underestimated the time needed to work on the suit. I did start the day before but that was tie-dyeing and fabric dyeing the materials for the suit. I didn’t end up taking pictures of all the stuff I did but here are pictures of the two fabrics I did end up using.

Redsuit with tie-dyed swirl.

There were so many pockets already on the suit I figured it would look too busy to put on additional pockets except for the arms and legs. I decided to start off with the red and white swirl because I noticed that it reflected the red and white swirl in the design on the back. There really wasn’t anywhere to put it except over the back pocket so that’s what I did.

By this time the last of my pieces had dried and where waiting to be ironed and as I’m coming up the stairs my son informs me that the one piece of fabric is “sick”. It took a second or two for this to register that that was a good thing.

Fire fabric

I created this piece of fabric by sewing it into a tube and placing it over a piece of plastic pvc pipe. The original white fabric was first dyed lemon yellow and then after scrunching the material tightly onto the tube the main area was overdyed red and the loose edges black.

Instead of making pockets I ended up sewing a piece down each leg. I’d run out of time at that point and this seemed the easiest solution – keeping in mind that I had to open up the seam on each leg and resew the seams after applying the fabric.

Dan's redsuit front view

Redsuit back view

Of course while I’m doing all of this and slowly realising that I’m not going to get as much done on the suit as I’d thought, I’m also informed that the students usually put their faculty letters on the legs. So I’m thinking “Oh yeah, black letters saying Mech Eng would be great – not a prayer”. I guess people who don’t sew don’t realise the time it takes. Anyhow I sent him off with a piece of black Kona that I’d fused to “Misty Fuse” and told him he could iron the letters on himself. I was also told that the suit looked a little barren but he’s going to have to come up with some stuff himself besides which there was only so much tie-dye you could put on the suit before over-whelming it. I did get a very nice “thanks mom” and hug so I guess “at the end of the day that’s all that counts”.

Karen (who is now done with crafty stuff on a deadline and can cook, clean and craft to her hearts content…or not)

Scarves done!

Finally the beaded scarves are all done. I must have been nuts to do them as I have a nasty suspicion that although they look nice the scarves won’t be appreciated for the amount of work that went into them, oh well.

I guess that’s the chance you take when you give a handmade item. Unless the receipient has specifically asked for what you’ve made then a person risks the possiblity that their gift won’t be appreciated. I found this out recently when I made my mother-in-law a bed jacket for a Christmas gift only to have it returned to me as she didn’t think she would wear it.

LOL, I could see exactly what was running through her mind. In her mind she pictured bed jackets as an item that elderly infirm women wore and she didn’t want to associate with that. In my mind I saw her as older (88 years) and easily chilled and pictured her wearing it as she sat doing whatever. It hurt that she didn’t want the gift but I appreciated her honesty. I’d rather the gift returned than have it sitting around collecting dust.

Then again there’s something to be said for the concept of receiving a gift, marvelling over it and then putting it away (perhaps to regift at some point in time?). It’s one reason why I tend not to give homemade gifts to my kids. I’ve spent most of my life as a mom doing crafty work yet none of them really appreciates anything I’ve made nor my husband. The possibility occurs that maybe I lack the talent of making the right item with the right colours but maybe its just a case of they figure its a hobby for me to do and another case of “Oh look what mom’s made now” while they’re thinking “Do I really have to take it?”. I have a feeling they might appreciate stuff for the grandkids more than they do for themselves.

Or at least I hope they will because I have a boatload of ideas in my head…

My grandkids “WILL” grow up loving tie-dye shirts and socks and whatever, lol.

Karen

Bridal shower and colour run

Well one event over and one left to go before life can get back to normal around here, not that it’s been much different just less pressure I guess to get things done.

After a massive house cleaning last week we had Jen’s bridal shower on Saturday and everything went smoothly thanks mostly to my other daughter Linda and her massive cooking efforts to feed the whole gang of people. Also the bridemaids stepped in to help out with all the other festivities and decorating, which was a good thing because by that time I was exhausted with all the cleaning I’d done.

Some pictures of the event:

Jen talking with some of the guests out in the backyard. Beautiful day with lots of sun and cool breezes.

Dessert in kitchen, unfortunately I was running around so much I forgot to take pictures of the main courses.

Linda and grandma Trudie dressed up in toilet paper made to look like brides in a game. Note grandma’s age appropriate flapper headdress for which she won the prize.

Jen and Linda my two beautiful girls.

Phil presenting Jen with some beautiful white roses after the shower.

It was the perfect day for the event, starting out in the living room/ dining room where we had the main course and then all moved out to the backyard for the games, gift openings and desert. People seemed to appreciate the gardens so I was pleased with my efforts and John had cut and bagged the grass so everything looked neat and trim.

Yesterday I dyed up the make green colour run and today I mailed off the swap. Just thought I’d post a picture so others can see what they’ll be getting in the mail.

Make green colour run from Dharma’s Lemon Yellow to ProChem’s Intense Blue.
Karen