Twirly Skirt and T-shirt

Thought I’d post a couple of pictures of a skirt and matching t-shirt I made Charlie. I’d made a skirt for Charlie over three years ago Charm Square Skirt and her mom says that it’s getting a bit on the short side but she still loves it so could I please make her another one.

I thought about making the same skirt but decided to go with different fabric since Charlie is a big fan of pink. The matching t-shirt is dyed with Grecian Rose from ProChem. You can find the tutorial for the skirt over at the Simple Simon & Company blog. Easy Tiered Skirt

Karen

Summertime and Tie Dyes

I had a request from my son-in-law for a new tie-dye shirt for my grandson as he’d out-grown his so I dug out the blank shirts and got busy doing some dyeing over the past few days. Really it’s amazing how many white shirts I have squirreled away in the closet. This is the last of the child-sized shirts but I have plenty of adult ones left. So I’m just going to photo bomb the blog and then write down the dyes used to make the shirts.

Group of shots of some of the tie-dyes in bags on the sunny deck and front porch. Even though the day wasn’t that warm the sun did it’s job.

Group of family rainbow spirals made with Light Red, Turquoise and Lemon Yellow.

Group shots of tie-dyes on drying rack on the deck.

Individual shirts:

Boysenberry, black and eggplant spiral.

Boysenberry, violet and eggplant spiral tank.

Caymen island blue onesie.

Family rainbow spirals, turquoise, lemon yellow, light red.

Fuchsia and grape spiral.

Pink heart with turquoise outline and grape and violet onesie.

Rainbow scrunched onesie, turquoise, lemon yellow, light red.

Toddler size 4 scrunched tee, turquoise, lemon yellow, light red.

Toddler size 4 made with turquoise, lemon yellow and black. Turquoise + lemon yellow gives the green.

Toddler size 6, fuchsia heart with lemon yellow outline and grape background.

Toddler size 6 rainbow spiral, turquoise, lemon yellow, light red.

Toddler size 6 turquoise with lemon yellow vee design. The turquoise laid down first and the lemon yellow on top.

Turquoise and lemon yellow tank.

Youth size small rainbow spiral, turquoise, lemon yellow and light red.

Youth size small vee, turquoise, black, light red and grape.

Youth size small, lemon yellow with turquoise spiral.

Lots of fun and colour. The dyes are still working after 8 years so I’m happy with that.

Karen

Rainbow Tie Dyes.

It’s been a while since I lasted blogged because I’m still working on several projects but my daughter asked me to tie-dye her a shirt for halloween and while I was going to the trouble of doing that I figured I might as well pull out some other items I’ve had sitting around so here goes.

Working in the laundry room.

Something new a scrunched shirt that I squirted stripes across both front and back.

The washed out shirt – turquoise, colbalt, intense blue and grape.

Ladies rainbow tee – turquoise, mixing red, bright orange, lemon yellow and grape.

Pleated onesie.

Blue onesie in turquoise, colbalt, intense blue(cerulean).

Rainbow vee onesie.

Rainbow onesie.

Rainbow onesie.

Toddler rainbow tee.

Rainbow vee.

Blue toddler t-shirt.

Since the onesies and toddler t-shirts were going to my grandsons I tried to make them match. I used elastics this time instead sinew to tie the shirts because I was lazy and I have to admit that the shirts seem to turn out anyway. And here are a couple of pictures of Chase in one of his shirts.

Carter and Chase playing on the floor.

Another shot of Chase and Carter but this time you can see the t-shirt.

Karen

Vacation Tie-Dyes and Homemade Pillowcase.

I have to admit that I’ve played hooky for the last few months from this blog. Part of the reason was we went on vacation and then the big catch up in the garden, which I admit is an excuse but sometimes it’s just nice not to have to do something.

Anyhow, we went on holiday – 4 days in Rome and then 11 days on a cruise to various ports of call. The hubby has always wanted one of my lemon yellow and turquoise t-shirts so I made up a batch of tie-dyes to take on holiday. It’s always easier to pick out family when they are wearing tie-dye simply because the colours are so bright and no one else is wearing them.

Tie-dyes batching in plastic ziplock bags in the sun.

More batching tie-dye.

Black, seafoam green and grape adult tee for my niece.

Grecian rose, Island green and grape for my sister-in-law.

Matching socks.

Rainbow shirt made for my husband it looks fantastic on him, very nice.

Scaly dragon shirt, Tom and Martine’s pattern from TrueTieDye It hasn’t found a home yet.

More socks.

Black and turquoise shirt.

Turquoise and lemon yellow, this is a fantastic combination and you can see it from half a mile away, trust me.

Turquoise, black and seafoam green. The green was rather muted on this one. The black was a solid on one side when applied as opposed to being applied in pie shaped wedges on both sides. This is why you get spirals of black in between the other colours unlike the black and turquoise spiral previously.

I saw this neat idea for a pillow on the Moda Bakeshop site and adapted it for my own use. I’m sure there have been lots of pillowcases made like this but it’s my first one and I’m rather proud of it. I like to use feather pillows because you can fluff them up nicely. The only problem is I like a lower loft pillow and the ones I buy from Costco are big. They say they are queen-sized but my pillowcases are several inches smaller than these pillows so when I force them into the case it gives me a really fat pillow. Anyhow, long story short I decided to make my own.

Pillowcase made with Kona percale cotton and various fabric’s from April Cornell’s Nature’s Notebook collection.

Close-up of the material. I really like these colours and when I get around to it I will be making a quilt probably dresden plate out of the fat quarter bundle I bought. I just need to buy some larger yardage for borders before it all gets sold out.

And lastly because I took a couple of before and after pictures:

Junk from desk top.

Clean desk, needless to say my desk is messy again but not quite as bad as before. A never ending flow of stuff migrating on and off the desk like a tide washing in and out on the beach.

Karen

Tie-dyed Toddler’s T-Shirts and Baby Onsies.

I had a request to tie-dye a shirt for a toddler I know. I’d given his mom one for him to wear a while back and he’s grown out of it but it’s his favorite shirt so I got busy the last couple of days and dyed up all the baby stock that I had. The shirts all came out okay but wouldn’t you know it, the one requested shirt with the rainbow swirl had a small hole in the front argh, it’s always the way.

Karen

Vacation and Shibori Pillow

Well I’m back from vacation and a good time was had by all. Thought I’d post a couple of pictures of my most favorite place to be in Vancouver and that’s the Spanish Banks. Think of Vancouver as being in the centre of a horseshoe and the spanish banks along the one side of the horseshoe.

When the tide is out you can walk out from the shore about a kilometre or so and the sight is phenomenal. I always love going there and if I only had one spot to visit this would be it.

Starting out at the shore of the Spanish Banks, Vancouver, Canada.

Looking out to the middle channel from the shore.

The beach is a popular place for dogs and owners so the shore is divided into an area for the dogs to play.

Looking east along the tidal flat to the city of Vancouver.

Starfish stranded at low tide.

Yours truely, its all about the tie-dye.

In front of a harbour signal light.

Close-up of the above shot standing about a couple of yards in front of the signal light.

Dead crab.

Looking back to shore from the edge of the channel at low tide.

One more picture of another harbour light that marks the opening of the channel into the Vancouver harbour. At this point the tide has turned and is starting to come in and now it’s a race back to the shore before we get stranded.

Back at the car, big owie. As we were rushing back to shore I turned back to see how far we had come and ploughed into a log mid-stride. You get submerged logs from the logging industry spotted along the coast and ships and boats really have to keep an eye out for these hazards. This log reminded me of the ones you see along the roadside as telephone poles. It was partially submerged and I didn’t see it until I was on top of it. I had a choice of either falling face forward or twisting backwards which I did but unfortunately my leg brushed up against it as I fell. LOL, I hadn’t planned on taking a swim.

Another favorite spot of mine is Granville Island. It’s an artsy spot with lots of little craft shops and a wonderful market that has the most yummy fritters full of apple or raspberry filling. The amazing thing about these fritters is that they are huge and one fritter will easily satisfy three people and they are made fresh on the spot. Another favorite shop is of course Maiwa that sells all the dye supplies that a person could want.

Maiwa also has a shop where they sell clothing and linens and while I was there I bought a pillow case that I became enamoured with. Lol, I admit to buying it so I could try and figure out how to do the same process at home…well that and it was gorgeous.

Pillow from Maiwa.

Flip side of the pillow.

Close-up of shibori work.

I have an idea of how the pillow was made but I’m not positive so if any one has any ideas let me know.

Karen

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

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

Tie Dyes for Halloween

My husband’s sister phoned a couple of days ago and wondered if I had some shirts she could borrow for a halloween party. I didn’t have any in her and her boyfriend’s sizes but said I could dye up a couple for her.

I’ve finally gotten around to downloading the pictures and thought I’d post them so here they are.

Rainbow Earth Tie Dye.

Rainbow bandana - basic accordian fold with black on one side and rainbow colours on reverse.

Multi-rainbow spiral

Rainbow spiral bandana.

I’m afraid the shirt pictures are a bit sloppy but they were big shirts and I had a hard time trying to get them just right as they kept wanting to fall off the hangers but you get the idea.

Karen