Happy Holidays!

Although I haven't been able to blog much recently I have been working! Below are a selection of pieces I have been working on over the last few weeks...

These are a few brooches / pins inspired by a session with the Region 2 IFA ladies, they are just so much fun to make and one of the few things I can make relaxing in front of the TV :)

I finally finished the icicles / snowy night wall hanging that I started nearly a year ago! This is a fairly large piece, measuring approx 3ft x 2 ft.

I finished (and photographed) a new pair of gloves. I don't know about you but I seem to be waiting for days if not weeks for enough daylight to take photos this month. Roll on spring!

The fishy reef nuno felt made a reappearance from the UFO box too, this is how it looked a few months ago.

Just adding some darker blue tones where the reef meets the water made a world of difference to the sense of perspective.

Then I got a bit paint happy...

It still needs some work, but it's making progress, I foresee a trip to the sewing machine to add some tiny fish in the distance....

Some dyeing, the red and orange wool is corriedale that I expect will become a bag. The blues are merino which I have carded into batts and plan to use with the blue variegated blue silk pictured below.

My technique for variegated dyeing is totally random, I just scrunch up handfuls of fabric and stuff it into a bag, hence I was surprised to see a distinct pattern on this piece of silk:

I'm hoping to make a dress from the blue materials and combine it with some screen printing techniques from Ruth's online class in January (click here for more information). If I can get the idea in my head to work, I plan to submit this dress to the Spinners Weavers and Dyers National Exhibition next year (no pressure Ruth! ;) )

Whatever your faith or denomination I hope you have a wonderful break, filled with fun activities and surrounded by the people you love.

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles...

...Pretty bubbles in the air.

Sorry, I will stop singing now [sheepish look]

Over on the Felting and Fiber Studio Forum, there was some confusion between washing soda, soda ash and bicarbonate of soda / baking soda. This last one got me thinking, bicarb will raise the pH (as do the other 2) but being a raising agent should create some bubbles when wet too - I wondered what effects could be achieved with the dye forming patterns around the bubbles?

So I devised a little experiment...

Firstly I wetted out some cotton strips with soda ash and urea solution and tried to create bubbles by different methods:

• bicarbonate of soda
• baking power (this contains bicarbonate of soda along with other things)
• washing up liquid (frothed up)
• no bubbles (this was the control - aren't I a good little scientist? :) )

I dripped procion dye solution over the bubbles.

These 2 are the bicarb and baking soda - overall rather disappointing, neither of them really produced any bubbles (perhaps my stocks are too old?).

The washing up liquid was more promising though:

At least there were bubbles, even if all the dye ran round the side of the bubbles and spread across the fabric. The right hand side was a slightly different approach, I mixed the dye with some washing up liquid, frothed it up and applied it.

These are the rinsed and dried samples in the same order, with the control at the end:

Well that didn't work as I hoped it would, back to the drawing board....

I concluded the washing up liquid might still work but if I used dry fabric the dye would be less likely to spread.

I soaked some cotton and silk in soda ash solution, wrung it out (but didn't rinse it) and allowed to dry. 

After a bit of practice I found creating a small pile of dye-free bubbles and then carefully piling a few bubbles mixed with dye was the most effective approach. Less (dye) is definitely more.

 

Although the silk looked promising at the bubble stage, unfortunately the dye spread across the fibres a little too easily I ended up with splodges again.

The cotton was better though with some really pretty patterns:

Q3 Challenge Part 1

The lovely ladies at the Felting and Fiber Forum recently posted the third quarter challenge. I confess I have been a bit rubbish  at completing these this year, although I did give some thought to the Q2 challenge and thankfully Q2 and Q3 are similar enough that I can transplant my idea from Q2 to the Q3 challenge.

I wanted to make a textural wall hanging using silk cocoons to add some extra dimension a bit like this but on a larger scale:

This quarter's challenge is focussed on colour and we are to use the colours selected from a photo or image as seen by a colour selector program in a textile piece.

This is the image I chose, Mr TB took it on one of our Sipidan dives and 6 years on, it is still one of my favourites (one day I will get around to making a more literal interpretation of it in felt):

I ran the photo through 2 programs:

Colour Adobe

 Palette FX

Of the two I much prefer the wider range of colours from Palette Fx so dyed some silk, yarn and cocoons alongside blending some merino and Norwegian wools on the drum carder in an effort to match 9 or 10 of the colours.

The results of the dyeing was interesting, I threw a mixture of materials into each bag filled with dye and acid solution expecting them to come out looking very similar.

Well the yellow did, only the yarn is a slightly deeper intensity:

And the cyan was similar, although again, the yarn is a stronger /deeper colour.

But the orange/brown gave me a complete range, the silk top and cocoons were the lightest and really quite orangey, while the silk chiffon is more of an orangey-brown colour, while the yarn is bordering on chestnut brown. Quite a range.... all from the same bag.

Is this just down to the light reflecting qualities of each material or do you think they are interacting (chemically) with the dye in different ways?

Here is the result of all the blending too, I'm including a couple of balls of merino that are similar to the colours generated by Palette FX and found a skein of sari yarn in my stash that is very similar to the purples. Not sure if it will make it into the final piece but I certainly have quite a range of fibres to play with :)

I'm really looking forward to putting the blue (second from left) with the yellowy-orange (second from right. They are complimentary on the colour wheel and of similar intensity so I'm expecting them to really make each other sing.

Now I just need to figure out how to assemble this wonderful pile of fluff into something interesting to hang on the wall.....

3D Coral

I came across this photo of coral by Wolfgang Seifarth on pinterest and it got me thinking about a 3D felt piece. It looks like felt already doesn't it?

Using a similar technique to the one I used to make my felt cuff for my C&G course I thought I should be able to make a 3D wall hanging. I wanted to dye it so that the folds of the "coral" are visually thrown forward of the background but I thought complementary colours would be too much, maybe a lighter colour on the tips than the background?

I constructed this piece from prefelts stitched together before fulling and then dyeing. I'm afraid I forgot to take a photo in my excitement to dye this piece. Here it is after the first round of dyeing.

It looks OK but I felt was missing something. So it went back into the dye pot...

And after mounting...

I like it but can see ways to improve it, most notably by placing the raised squiggles closer together as they are in the coral photo.

BTW, I got my dates for Weyfest mixed up, it's not until next weekend, so I'm sure to make one or two more hats between now and then! Watch this space :)

Translucent felt

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been doing almost obscene amounts of dyeing this week, one batch was for my C&G course and was predominantly focussed on dyeing different animal fibres in the same dye vat (bag in my case) so you end up with a harmonious blend of colours in a range of materials. I chose to use each pair of primary colours so had 3 "vats" and the these are the results.

Each vat contained, Corriedale top, some alpaca top, silk hankies, ponge 5 silk, a piece of commercial prefelt, some merino pencil roving and a piece of hand spun White Faced Woodland.

For good measure I threw in some of my scoured Jacobs fleece too...

The colours are so lovely I kept finding myself standing in the bathroom literally watching them all dry :) Needless to say I couldn't wait to use them...

Our brief from the course was to create a piece of textured felt using the design work form previous weeks (in my case I had been working with bone micrographs).

I cut out some silk shapes that resembled the holes you see in bone when under the microscope.

And laid resists over the top that were just slightly smaller than the silk.

Then added 2 layers of the corriedale roving, pulling the tufts was lovely as I had different colours with each pull.

I even spun some of the orange/red pencil roving, my spinning is definitely improving but I'm not about to win any prizes for producing beautifully even yarn.

After felting and cutting out the resists.

I'm really pleased with how this piece turned out but it really comes to life when you hold it up to the light:

The corriedale has produced a beautiful crimp and the silks look like stained glass windows. I think this technique would make a stunning lampshade or even curtains.

Here is a closer look at the curly corriedale, this is fast becoming one of my favourite wools to work with:

Now I just need to figure out a way to hang it so it can be hung in front of a window and the frame / hanger does not cast a shadow that would detract from the design....

I also repeated the dyeing a variety of different fibres exercise. Following advice from Ruth I tried some grey and brown too (thanks Ruth). It's still a bit monochromatic but an improvement on the last version :)

Linking up to nina-marie, off the wall Friday