A Facebook story

This week I have told a story installments on Facebook about a shetland vessel that I dyed. For those of you who don't do Facebook I am going to repeat it here.

I made a shetland vessel from white and moorit coloured fibres with the aim of stitching it and then dyeing it. I am actually still exploring the best way to felt with shetland and it seems onto devour soap and need loads of water.

Here it is before stitching.

I stitched it with linen and silk threads and thought it looked more stylish with a cuff.

Now to dye. My first thoughts was to use some of the onion skins I have been saving but I decided to save them for a less prototype project and use the dried up skins of two pomegranate that I have also been storing . I deviated from my usual practise of keeping kitchen and dyeing equipment completely separate and first blitzed the pomegranate skins with water in my food processor.

The vessel was then heated at simmering point with the extracted colour from the pomegranate and left to soak over night.

After dyeing it looks paler than I would have ideally like , with not much variation of colour between the wool , silk and linen,

But with the threads sorted and a slate plinth I am quite pleased with the final effect. Thanks to Dave Mercer for thIs photograph .

 

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Exhibition piece - Part 1

ArtybIrdcarnforth are having a spring exhibition in, not surprisingly , Carnforth UK. All week I have been preparing my piece.

My inspiration is this small part of Far Easedale Gill. The photo was taken on a cold April Day.

My piece will be made all in white and then naturally dyed. Just to be sure I have been doing some more dye tests. I was interested to see what difference pH would make to madder dying .

These results are not quite as different as I expected , but maybe I need a bigger pH change than from 5 to 7 . More work is needed I think!

I have also been preparing all my fabric and fibres which when added to the felt will build the texture and then the colours after dyeing.

Here they are all laid out on my table , not looking much at the moment but after felting and dyeing should be beautiful. I hope !

 

Posted with Blogsy

Feedback please

I am a novice at natural dyeing. The chemistry of the reactions with the animal and plant based fibres. The use of mordants. The actual process of the dyeing , of extracting the dye out the plant material and getting it into the fibres to enable them to react. The whole process fascinates me. This is not really surprising as these kind of process have played a large part of my career as an engineer.

So I recklessly decided that my final C&G wall hanging would be naturally dyed. I decided to use madder. I didn't not grow the plant in my garden , although this is possible , I bought ready ground roots. Madder gives orange to red colours depending on the conditions of the dyeing. I determined not to try and be too clever but just dye my two pieces in my madder bath and wait and see what happens.

I am pleased with the results and one of the requirements of the course is to obtain feedback on the pieces. so I am requesting readers of this blog to please give me some feedback on the two pieces below. So I hope you can spare me a little of your time to tell me what you think .

Photographs © courtesy of Dave Mercer.

Thank you

 

Posted with Blogsy

White , at the start but not at the finish

In September 2011 I nervously wrote my first blog , about a piece of white felt I made at the start of my Artybird courses. Very basic !! I was quite happy about the felt but I was nervous about becoming a blogger. Since then I have written another 139 blog posts and I am no longer nervous at all.

This week strangely I return to all white again for my final pieces of course work - two wall hangings.

These have been made from Blue faced Leicester , as was the first piece . But that is were the similarity ends. The first was just BFL , flat felt , these last two have many many additions. First silk fibres and alpaca yarn , followed by scrim , silk chiffon and mulberry bark . Cords made of BFL wrapped in silk fibres were added next and on one piece fibre balls. The final additions were mixed fabric pleated pieces .

Here are all the elements prepared and ready for adding to the fibres before feltIng.

 

The two pieces felted.

All ready for this glorious madder dye bath.

I can't wait to see how they will turn out.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Nearly Finished!

Well after nearly three years and an awfull lot of fun and felt I am working on the design of my final City and Guilds project. It will be a natural dyed textured wall hanging. Well actually I am going to make two , so I can made good use of my dye pot !

The inspiration comes from this photograph .

Which has been manipulate many times via collages and photoshop.

Actually I have so many images it really hard to decided which to use but eventually I have chosen these two.

 

I have started sketching parts of these images to be the base for my hangings and so far I think these are my real starting points.

My fabrics are all prepared and mordanted and I am ready to go .

 

Posted with Blogsy

Wild colour

A number if months ago I made a mixed fabric felt piece threw it in the mx dye bath , and got a very surprising for result .

I received the comment for Kate my tutor that dying animal and vegatable fibres together would not work , except perhaps with natural dyes. I had a book called Wild Color by Jenny Dean and a vision in my head of the piece I want to make so I decided to explore the avenue of natural dying, I have been researching , mordants, modifiers and natural dyes. What a complicated business it is.! I have made up some copper , iron and aluminum mordant solutions and mordanted some silk and cotton fabrics .

What I did not know , was if you mordanted a fabric or fibre and then felt it , is the mordant still active. I decided to do some small experiments because I am conserving my mordanted fabric . I love the effect I have achieved but I am not sure I can answer my own question yet.

Carrots tops from the garden

Ivy from the garden

And on a slightly larger scale onions skins.

I am approaching my vision now and I am going to continue exploring wild color.

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

A paler shade of dandelion

In discussion with Artybirds tutor Kate regarding my previous strange dying results , she mentioned that dying mixed animal and vegetable fibres simultaneously is very tricky and might be best done with natural dyes. I was pondering this advice when while out on my bike near my home I saw a sea of dandelion flowers. Perfect for a natural dyeing experiment. Nothing too big, or complicated just some fabrics and fibres as a test.

So I returned to the field of flowers with my collecting bag and picked dandelion heads . Well I quickly picked rather a lot 650g. Rather more than I needed for my small experiment.

 

I then tried simply boiling the flowers to extract the dyes. No mordants, additives were added, which I know is probably wrong. However in my enthusiasm for this totally unplanned a experiment it had not thought to get any suitable chemicals.

After straining I simmered my fabrics and fibres, mixed vegetable and animal sourced for 30 mins .

I left them to steep over night and then rinsed and dried the dyed samples.

Very pale , but quite satisfactory for a first natural dying venture.

A bit more research is needed now into mordants etc and then I will dare to dye a combined felted piece again.

 

Posted with Blogsy