Mushrooms and Rust, Oh My!

After the weeks of rain we had here in Mt. Airy, we had loads of moss and a great variety of mushrooms growing all over the place - these are just a few that I decided to gather and wrap in some silk gauze to see what would happen. Well it is now sitting the same rusty water outside in a brass pot alongside some softly colored silk with bright red rose petals wrapped inside (from my 49th wedding anniversary bouquet from my sweetheart) .

Here are the packages before they are soaked - the white has the mushrooms inside. Poor things are being quite tortured out in the rain, sun and goodness knows what else. I can't wait to "disrobe" them this weekend! I'll be sure to take pictures of the results!

Blackberries, Copper and Rust

Well this was a very interesting experiment; I wanted to do more rust dyeing so I did some reading and found a very interesting article on-line (sorry, don't remember where as I read so much) anyway, I found that if you mix vinegar and salt and add some copper (in my case copper tubing) that any other metal you add after the copper has been sitting in the mix such as screws, paperclips, etc., will turn copper; something to do with the copper ions transferring.

This piece of silk began pink from the blackberry dyeing a few weeks back; the color was just okay nothing exiting - so I soaked it in vinegar, wrapped up some keys and pennies that had been treated in the copper/vinegar mix inside, tied it up and put it in the rusty water for a week or so covering it all with plastic.

I'm just amazed at how gorgeous this is - the pictures do not do it justice at all and capture only small sections of the interesting designs. I am considering listing it on Etsy after I have my fill of gazing at it for a while!

A Whole Lot of Knitting Going On

I made this for Meg's, our 14-year-old granddaughter -- it is a sweater made from machine knitted swatches and samples, serged together with a little crochet and embroidery added.

Meg could be a model and when she tried it on, it fit her perfectly and she looked adorable - but did I get a picture -- NO!!! I'm so annoyed at myself; I was worried that it may not fit because I didn't have a pattern for her size but I guess I remembered from my last "hug."

I knitted several "artsy" scarves on my knitting machine and forgot to take pictures. One was a lovely deep red and I dropped some stitches to allow me to weave a feathery art yarn through the holes for a Birthday gift and another with fabulous curls running through it (A Noro soft mix of greys and seafoam with matching curls that had touches of shrimp; my fav - and it is now in SC).

Eco Dyeing

I had this gorgeous bouquet of roses in the most glorious colorway so I wanted to savor them and try my hand at eco dyeing. I had some silk pieces on hand (habotai and dupioni) that had been mordanted with Alum a while ago for a class I was taking and that had never been used - I wet the silk; spread the petals (from 2 dozen roses), some leaves and the hips before layering the fabric accordian style. I bundled it up, tied it tightly, put it in a pot of boiling water with a tiny bit of lemon and cherry Koolaid as the fabric was just so white! then I wrapped it with saran wrap and sat out in the heat for a couple of days.

this is it being unwrapped; the habotai took the color better than the dupioni; very subtle and so delicate - I love it!

The other pieces were ho hum so I found (actually my husband found) some really rusted barrel hoops that I wrapped it around after rewetting it- this WAS supposed to be an experiment after all - wrapped it again with saran wrap and left it out in the elements. I loved the black marks made by the rusty hoops.

Still not totally satisfied with the background, I used some blackberries that I'd saved in the freezer - cooked and strained them before wrapping the fabric in rubber bands and re-dyeing - I just love how it turned out. I have rinsed it but I'm going to leave it to cure for a while before I try felting with it.

It is so dull today so the pictures aren't great - you truly can't see the subtle colors and the gorgeous sheen - the dark rust marks are just so neat - I love them! - I had no idea that the rust would turn black. I'm really interested now in pigment dyeing and have been gathering information and learning all I can - that will be my next experiment, I think.

FUNDRAISING GALA

Ann, an internet friend from NC is involved in a special fundraiser for the hospital where her husband works - I've donated this "circles" (one of my favorites) silk and merino vest to their cause for Breast Cancer and I'm sure they have plenty of other goodies too.

Ready to Go!

Silk and wool eyeglass case from Etsy
packed and ready to mail to it's new owner!

Experiments in Felt

Isn't this a fabulous wood block? I couldn't wait to start playing with it. I really didn't have the time to get the dyes out so I opted for fabric paint this time just to see if my idea would work in the short time that I had to play. I wanted to create a nuno prefelt, cut out some holes and felt it onto a bottom piece of habotai. Habotai takes a little more work to felt since the weave is closer than gauze but I think the crinkly effects are well worth the extra work. I know from previous attempts that holes in wool felt do not get smaller as the felting progresses; however, in this case because the prefelt was silk, the holes got much smaller but you can still see a tiny bit of orange peeking through on piece #2. To begin with I stamped a long piece of hand-dyed silk and cut it in two pieces; one I simply felted to see how the stamp design would hold up - on the other, I cut out some holes around the top design and stopped felting just when the fibers held to the silk before adding it to a piece of orange habotai and really felting it well -- I learned that next time, I'll cut the holes much larger if the prefelt is silk if I want more of the under fabric to show through.

I wanted to try adding a habotai nuno prefelt to a piece of silk gauze - trying to perfect this technique before I do a larger piece - I was really pleased at the "crunchy" texture of the habotai.