Dreaming Spirals

Around Christmas time I treated myself to a few of Lisa Peter’s gorgeous raku buttons – I love her pottery and I had a hard time deciding which to buy.  I love the earthy feel of these three….

Also around this time, I decided to take advantage of the snow and do some snow dyeing.  I did this totally erratically without referring to any written instructions but I like the way these turned out.  I piled all the fabric on top of each other and this is what it looked like with the snow on top (complete with bits of organic greenery to add to the design!)

Here is one of the pieces of fabric – this is quite transparent cotton organdie (I always wondered what organdie was from the song Scarborough Fair!).

I hung this up on my design wall over the top of one of my practice reeds samples and was interested to note that the reeds were more visible through the black part than the white, for some reason…

Here is a closer look so you can see what I mean:

I think I’ll have to exploit that property sometime!

This is some silk crepe fabric:

I love the strokeable texture of it here:

The colours are closer to the above photos but this one captures the markings better.  I may have taken it when it was wet.  For some reason, silk crepes and organzas are very difficult to photograph without the colours being washed out.  Anyone know why?  I wonder if it is related to the way the light reflects off the fibres.

I have been slowly washing out more of the fabric.  In between buying some gorgeous teal coloured boiled wool/viscose fabric and making it into a jacket!  More later on that…

I printed this piece of silk with corrugated cardboard (the yellowy bits) and then overprinted with a gocco screen made with the same stamp that I used for the maroon coloured fabric in the last post.  I think this one changed the least when I washed it out. 

Here is the washed version:

And a detail:

For the next piece, I used these ochres from Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean, and soy milk as a binder, made from soy beans. 

This is what it looked like when I painted it.

And here it is washed … I like the way you get more definition in the washed version.

Here it is on my design wall, next to a piece which had been previously rusted dyed and which I overpainted with the ochres, giving some subtle textures.

This one looked the most unpromising when I printed it.  I’ve got a feeling I used it as a wiping-up cloth and then screened over the top with the gocco screen made from the image of a letter.

It definitely looks more promising now!

Last week I had a break from washing out fabric and did some dressmaking for a change! I went shopping in Cardiff the previous weekend and bought this gorgeous teal coloured boiled wool fabric from the newly opened John Lewis.  This jacket only took a morning to make! I did make a practise version with some green cotton/viscose fabric I had lying around and actually this one was easier to make because the curved seams were a doddle with this stretchy fabric.  Also, I didn’t have to hem anything as it is boiled wool and doesn’t fray!  It’s super warm and cozy and I’ve already worn it a lot.  Which is more than can be said for a lot of my previous dressmaking attempts!   I bought the pattern a few years ago meaning to use it with some of my dyed fabrics and I have even more incentive to use it now I’ve made it twice.  It’s the swing fever jacket from CNT Pattern Co (no affiliation).

Here we are … some of the fabrics I printed last year and just washed out.  I’m rinsing out about three pieces a day so even this is taking time!

I printed this one with a gocco screen.  It started out as an eraser which I carved to make a stamp, printed to make a repeating pattern then I scanned it into the computer and enlarged it and printed it out.   I then overprinted it with a screen made from a letter.  This is the washed out version – it doesn’t actually look much lighter than the original (some of them lost quite a lot of colour).  I think this is logwood.  Most of these are printed on silk.

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This one is a screen made from a photo of a tree.  I printed and overprinted it in three colours of natural dyes.  This one did wash out quite a lot but I kind of like the subtle effect.  This is the unwashed version:

And this is the washed out one.  Quite a difference, as you can see.  But I quite like it in parts.

This one changed the most.  It consists of two screens.  One is a gocco screen made from a stamp I carved of a bird’s foot.  I printed this one first.  Then the second screen is a blank screen with roughly torn masking tape stuck across it – it is supposed to look a bit like cracked mud. 

This is the washed out version – I like it more because you can see the bird prints more clearly.  The mud cracks are in two or three different shades of brown – this is just a detail of the whole piece.

I don’t think I have a ‘before’ photo of this tree, but it is clay painted using ochres from Clearwell Caves, some caves in the Forest of Dean which are also ancience iron mines.  I used soy milk as a binder.  The ochres seemed to wash out a lot less than the natural dye extracts I used.  It is painted on cotton organdie which is semi transparent so is a bit difficult to photograph.

That’s all I’ve photographed at the moment – more to follow!

In common with the rest of the UK, we had lots of snow last week and my 3 sons were off school – they are due to go back tomorrow and I think we are all ready for that to happen!    It snowed heavily last Tuesday night, and this was the scene on Wednesday morning.  I wouldn’t normally stand in the middle of that road to take a photo but as it is the top of a steep hill, only 4 wheel drive vehicles were attempting to get up it.  I love the quiet and the clean, crisp landscape.  

And the wintry trees covered with snow.

I fulfilled January’s reed photos that day too.  Here they are – very dry and dead looking.

Crisp, brown and papery….

On the way back I didn’t see many snowmen, but I did see this enormous snowball!  That is a rubbish bin at the side.

After several very cold, icy nights, the temperature has risen and the snow has got very soft and slushy again.   I don’t know how much longer it’ll last but it has been fun for a while.  Meanwhile, this afternoon I finally rinsed out some of the fabric I screenprinted and painted with natural dyes this time last year so hopefully in the next post there will actually be some textile content!

… to all my blog readers. 

I’m afraid I’ve been rather lacking in blog posts over the last couple of weeks, and any photos I took of the Christmas festivities are now sadly out of date.  Who wants to look at Christmas cakes and trifles when they are suffering from a surfeit of them?  Maybe I’ll save them till the middle of summer..

I have just acquired a new laptop and have been busy getting to grips with Windows 7 (which I’ve actually found pretty intuitive so far, once I turned off all the manufacturer’s annoying popup reminders and software and configured Thunderbird to act and feel as much like Outlook Express as possible. 

I haven’t quite organised my photos yet so here are a few reedy ones I took the last time I remembered my camera!  My new laptop has a nifty little card reader in the side but since my camera didn’t have any photos on it that wasn’t much help:(   

Look at the yellow leaves on these reeds … when I walked this way in November, they were all a brilliant yellow!   Sadly, I didn’t have my camera with me.  It’s amazing how different they look from one month to the next.  Once they were a deep green and the seedheads were a purply colour.  I have decided to try and retrace my steps WITH my camera at least once a month through this year.  Maybe I should look to see if this new laptop has a loud bleep to remind me of such things! 

So… two resolutions for the new year … Blog More and Monthly Reed Photos.  And I need to take an online course or two to get my creativity kickstarted again.   What about you?

Inspired by Tim Holtz’s 12 tags of Christmas, I have been playing with inkpads and embossing powder to create tag backgrounds, which could, of course, be used on any paper.  I like his first year’s12 tags from 2 years ago, as they seem to be simpler and have less ‘bling’!  More arty and abstract…

It was my birthday last week so I treated myself to a few of his tools, like the ink blending tool and the edge distresser. 

I’m not sure what (or whether) I am going to stamp on top of these or embellish them or whether to leave them as examples…

For this one I used his ink blending tool and rubbed blue ink and burgundy ink on to the tag.  Then I sprinkled water over it, left it for about 10 seconds and then dried it with a heat gun.  The edges are distressed with the edge distresser.  I’ll probably rub some more ink into the edges to make them look more tattered.

I started off by painting over this tag entirely with black acrylic paint.  Then I stamped the tree stamp on to it with embossing ink and embossed them with clear embossing powder.  Then I dabbed a couple of different colours of acrylic paint all over and left it to dry.  Ulp.  What had I done?  But then I rubbed an eraser over it (Tim says a wet paper towel in his blog but he used his special paint dabbers so the paint might be different – I just used some Golden acrylics that I already have and it needed a bit more persuasion to reveal the trees underneath but the eraser did it just fine).    I do like the effect of this, the trees sort of poking out ghostily (is that a word?!!) from the background.

Here is a close up.  Good texture, eh?

For this one I rubbed an orange inkpad over the tag and then sprinkled clear embossing powder all over.   Then I flicked some of it off into the rubbish bin to make the speckled look.  Then I heated up the embossing powder and then rubbed a darker colour ink with the ink blending tool over the top.  Actually, Tim’s looks a lot more speckled than mine.  Obviously I need a bit of practice!

This one was meant to  be the same as the above but I used white embossing powder by mistake so I stamped an image over the top.  Nice texture again, though…

For this one I mixed up some distress reinker ink and some Pearl-ex powder with water in a misting bottle and sprayed it, using some stencils as a mask.  I think the image would be clearer if I’d used freezer paper or something which adheres to the paper but I quite like this effect.  Then I inked over the masked bits and did the trick with the water splotches again.  Then I painted one of the stars with clear crackle paint.  Fun!

For this one I was playing with green crackle paint which I then pounced blueish ink over to get in the cracks.  I had a play with my eyelets here too.

I’m sure some of these effects will find their way into my gocco printed images and the Moleskine journals…  And no doubt on to fabric too….