See, hear and taste

A week of my life gone, vanished in the process of doing my taxes!  Here's a quick report on my trip a few weeks ago to the annual Original Sewing & Quilting Expo in Cleveland.  This is the one held at the I-X Center, the former WWII bomber factory (later produced tanks during the Korean War).  Lots of history in those walls.

I saw the SAQA "Two by Twenty" exhibit - delightfully inspiring, as expected.  I noticed a few quilts whose edges were not bound in the traditional manner, looked to be just stitched very close to the edges to hold the three layers.  I will be exploring this "non-binding" in the next few months.

As I was anticipating having to pay a bunch on my taxes, I could not purchase much, but I found a few mixed bags from a couple different vendors:

Kimono silk scraps, and a bunch of fancy ribbons and trims.  I cannot resist embellishments!  I see more crazy quilt-type collages in  my future.  Stunningly, where I bought the most was not from a sewing vendor.  I purchased a small fortune of blended teas from SubRosa Tea.  I'm not much of a tea drinker, but their blends are quite creative and delicious.  I am enjoying Pina Colada, Spiced Mexican Chocolate, Cafe Latte, Strawberry Ginger, Chocolate Mint, and Coconut Truffle.  I appreciate creative and quality food as much as I love beautiful dyed fabric and art quilts.  To finish off this ramble on appealing to the senses, I have been listening this week to Verdi - Il Trovatore, Smetana - Ma Vlast, and Mendelssohn - Hebrides Overture and Symphonies #3 and #4.

Sunflower Silk

I truly have far more ideas than I have time.  There are three future posts in my head, based on some observations I have made from children's' books, and I am lacking the time to develop and type them... at least this week.  I have simply tried to jam too much into this week.

Anyway, here's the result of a little fabric dye experiment I managed to do over the past weekend:

I dyed silk with sunflower seed hulls, scraped up from beneath my bird feeders!  I'm not sure I will bother to do that again, the color isn't anything great.  I might try growing a variety of sunflowers cultivated by the Hopi for dyeing their wool rugs.  Maybe a different variety will yield stronger colors.

Onion Dye

I have not been accomplishing much these past couple of weeks, but I have dabbled in a couple of odd projects.  Both were fabric dyeing projects, and ones that I could start and leave sit to do other things.  First was a batch of silk, dyed with onion skins:

It took me two years to save up enough onion skins to be able to dye a few pieces of silk.  I am not a fan of onions; I only use a little bit of them here and there in cooking.  I am pleased with the lovely color, even though it is similar to the color that the dahlias yielded last fall.  Isn't it amazing how much darker the silk chiffon dyed? (The chiffon is the  rumpled fabric on the right.)  For the first time in my plant dye adventures, the basement did not smell like rotten... something during the simmering process.  It simply smelled like I was cooking onion soup, not a bad smell, just not something I would ever eat!

Tomorrow, I will show off my latest rust dyed fabric.

Hollyhocks in December

An extra post this week, as I am excited about my hollyhock dyed silk!  I was expecting some deep red-violet colors, instead I got this:

Interesting gray-green shades; color I thought was not possible without an iron modifier (something I have not tried yet).  I used flowers from a "black" hollyhock that I started from seed.

Maybe the red-violet color that was indicated in the book could be achieved with flowers from true red hollyhocks.  I will plant both red and black hollyhocks in 2017.

More Cigarette Silks

In an earlier post this year, I lamented the lack of cigarette silks in my collection of vintage textiles.  I have corrected that now, with this recent antiques mall find:

This is an unfinished project, done in the crazy quilt assembly style.  Most of the pieces are true cigarette silks, printed with flags of various nations.  The silks are larger than the two that I have already, these are about 3 X 4".  Two pieces are commemorative ribbons from social club events with a European ancestry requirement.  These identical ribbons are dated 1927, and I have no idea yet what language they are imprinted with... will have to investigate "Kesajuhlet."  The world of old social clubs and secret societies is a whole areal of study on their own, a fascinating study.... for someone else!

The silks are machine sewn to a piece of muslin backing, then lengths of satin ribbon were machine sewn over the seams,  The maker hand stitched over almost all of the ribbon with a herringbone stitch.  What I want to know (and never will) is why the yellow herringbone stitching on the top horizontal row stops half way across, and why four of the silks are upside down.

What is fun for me is making connections with these vintage objects,  I'll never know the maker or the answers to the above questions, but I am certain that the hand stitches are done in Glossilla Rope embroidery cording ("Brighter than Silk").  I found a stash of new-old-stock Glossilla at a recent quilt show:

I have found it to be impossible to pull through regular cotton fabric, but it works well for couching or for the weaving thread in whipped and threaded back and running stitches.  Someday soon I will try it through silk.

More Fabric Flowers

I have been chipping away this week at various nearly-finished projects.  One of the projects has been a sample for a future class that I want to teach.  Part of the sample includes making dimensional flowers with Tyvek (the woven plastic house wrap stuff) and fabric.  The process of working with Tyvek is detailed in Fabric Embellishing: The Basics and Beyond (Ruth Chandler, Liz Kettle, Heather Thomas, Lauren Vleck, Landauer Publishing, 2009).  I'm not going to quote the entire process here, but here is one thing to do with the Tyvek - spring flowers!

It seems like every creative project has to go though on ugly stage, even this quick, simple flowers.  Here they are, cut out after free motion quilting:

Not very exciting at this point.  But, after heating the fabric and Tyvek "sandwiches," they turn into this:

Much more interesting, no?  I still have to add beads to the centers.  Some of my flowers looked horrible before the heat treatment, but the puckering hides a lot of problems.  There were a few flowers that I thought would be fine, but did not turn out well in the end, sometimes it is best not to try and predict the outcome, but keep on making and see what happens.


 

More Plant Dye Adventures

I finally got around to mordanting some silk and a bit of wool fleece to trial the late summer flowers in the dye pot.  The first test was not a flower, but a pint of blueberries that got pushed to the back of the fridge.  I normally would not use edible goods for dyeing, but by the time I found the blueberries, they were not fit for human consumption.   They yielded a nice blue-violet color with some interesting green mottling.  I anticipate that the color will fade over time, as most berry dyes are prone to do.

 

Next, I tried a batch of Joe Pye Weed, an immensely tall plant that blooms a large cluster of wispy dusty pink florets.  I know enough already to never expect that a plant will yield the color of its flowers.  The Joe Pye resulted in a nice golden color.

 

Speaking of not getting results that you expected, I did expect a nice red-violet color from some hibiscus flowers.  What I got was a murky green-gray.  Not at all what one of my books promised.  I have no idea what went wrong.  I tried the hibiscus twice, same result. 

 

After the hibiscus disappointment, I cooked up a pot of ironweed.  The flower clusters of this plant are a vibrant red-violet, so intense that you might not think they are real.  It would be amazing if the flowers really did impart their color in the dye bath.  The ironweed, after rinsing, drying and pressing, turned out to be….

 

The same color as the Joe Pye Weed!  The ironweed is on the left, Joe Pye Weed on the right in the above image.  I knew I was not going to get a bright pink-red; the one book that discussed ironweed as a dye indicated it would result in a bright pale green.  I am starting to re-think my grand scheme to have a big dye plant garden and sell yards and yards of lovely plant dyed fabric.  At least not anytime soon, I have lots of learning yet, and tinkering with process and recipes.

 

Last week, my mom brought me a nice bouquet of dahlias from her garden.  When the flowers faded, they went into the dyepot.  The silks came out a very pale creamy orange.  At last, something a little different!  They soaked in the dye for over 24 hours, so I am a bit surprised that the color was so light.  I am going to re-read the mordanting instructions, I must be skipping something.

 

Next on my list: sumac berries, marigolds, beets and goldenrod.

Spring plant dye: Horsetail

Now that spring is well underway, I have a steadily increasing amount of different plants to try as dyes.  There is a shallow ditch running along the road frontage of my family’s acreage that is filling in with horsetails.  By horsetails, I ‘m not talking about the last part of Secretariat to cross the finish line, these horsetails are Equisetum arvense, a bright green, stiff, spindly, primitive plant.  The Equisetums are fascinating plants, “closely allied to the prehistoric order of the Calamitales, large and abundant treelike plants of the Carboniferous period nearly three hundred million years ago.”  (Boughton Cobb, A Field Guide to Ferns and their Related Families, Houghton Mifflin, 1963, p. 194)  Horsetails may be used for dyeing, here is the result:

 

A nice light tint of yellow green on the cottons, a bit darker on the silk.  I added a bit of alkaline modifier in the form of wood ash solution to one pot, and it seemed to lighten the color.  I’ve given up on weighing and measuring like most of my sources suggest.  Rough visual estimates are working fine for me, and if a batch of fabric doesn’t turn out, I’ll just try it again with a new dyebath. 

 

The sprigs in the picture that look like pine needles are the horsetail plant.

I’ve always had a deep appreciation for the natural world, I spent summers as a youngster tagging along with my mother to her job at a natural history museum.  Now that I am living on rural acreage, I am reacquainting myself with the wild flora and fauna.  While I was harvesting horsetails for dyeing, I was reminded of Albrecht Durer’s Great Piece of Turf watercolor from 1503.  The longer I concentrated on a square foot of meadow edge, I found more and more different plants.  Tip of the day: Never completely strip an area of a plant you are collecting, only take a fraction of what is there, and collect only if there is an abundance of what you seek.  Of course, don’t trespass either!

Hungry Squirrels

The squirrels in my area had to share their stash of acorns and black walnuts with me this winter.  Believe me, what I collected for my fabric dyeing was miniscule compared to what I left behind for the wildlife.  Here’s how my first attempts at natural dyes turned out:

 

The cottons didn’t take the dyes too well, some of the literature on natural dyes hints at that.  The silk organza though, really soaked it up.  I definitely want to try more silks in the future, and wool fabric as well.  I have been peeling lichen off of my firewood, and I think I just about have enough to try a small batch of fabric.  I have also been picking up fallen wild cherry branches, and have them soaking in water for a dye session soon.  The wild cherry is supposed to yield pink tones.  The lichen, I have no idea as to possible color, but I know that it can be used as a dye.