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.

A couple of years ago I bought the DVD Markmaking with Nature from Kimberly Baxter Packwood.  Kimberly is extremely knowledgeable about all things related to natural dyeing, and one of them is a technique she calls compost dyeing.  I have been intrigued and wanted to try it for a while now, but didn’t get round to it till January.  Basically, it involves laying natural dye extracts and other vegetable matter on fabric and shoving it in the compost heap for a while. 

Well, it was January, so I left out the compost heap bit, but I did the rest, wrapped it up with a load of natural dye extracts and some banana skins and rolled it up, soaked it in vinegar, nuked it in the microwave to start it off, and left it for 2 months.  How about that for self discipline?!!  Anyway, yesterday the suspense got too much. I was going to leave it for a while longer given that the weather wasn’t all that warm (it has been inside, not out so it didn’t get TOO cold).  And the results were amazing!

I did two pieces, both silk.

This one is a sort of silk crepe.  I put a lot of logwood on this, I think, and various other things (I was extremely disorganised and just grabbed handfuls of whatever dye extracts I have). 

This shows some of the markings on it.

And this one is a habotai silk scarf.  I think I used a lot of madder on this one.

This was the one which had the banana skins rolled in with it.  I had to hang it over the chair to photograph it – it was incredibly hard to photograph as the light just bounced off the sheen of the silk.

Both together:

I’m so glad these turned out well, because I also tried rinsing a thin section of some of the screenprinted fabric and ochre painted fabric that I also did with natural dyes and those were disappointing.    I don’t know whether the gum was too thick or whether I just need to leave it a lot longer, but most of the colour washed out of the tiny sample that I did.  I may just leave the ochre painted one as most of my art won’t be washed anyway.  Time will tell…

In December of 2007, I issued an invitation to surface designers through the Complex Cloth Internet list. Anyone who was interested in working on a dyed two yard length of silk habotai was to write to me and indicate interest. I put all the names in a hat, and drew out twelve participants’ names. I wanted it to be a democratic event.

I spent a happy evening reading the wonderful blog The Art Cloth Challenge. Go and have a look – it’s really worth it! And amazing to see what different cloth resulted from 12 people’s vision of the same piece of cloth and to read their journals about how they altered it.

This is what it looked like all pristine and white:

This is it indigo dyed:

I boiled up the onion skins for about 45 minutes and extracted the dye and then simmered the roving in it.  Haven’t got any photos of that stage but here is some silk which I did in the exhaust dye.

Now it’s hanging on the line:

Here’s the fibre I dyed, drying on some newspaper:

And here is a photo of the silk – it is actually a deeper colour than that.

You can find it here.

Here are some pics of it:

In case you missed it the first time round, here is my blog post where I used it for a house journal when I was doing the second of Sue Bleiweiss’s online journal making courses.

A week ago I took the kids on the train to Weston-super-Mare for the day.  It is only across the Bristol Channel from us as the crow flies but by land you have to go all around and through Bristol so I hadn’t been there for several years.  It is a typical Victorian British seaside resort complete with pier:

As you can see, the tide goes out a long way!  There weren’t many people on the beach because it was a VERY windy day!

It also has the usual beach stalls selling balls, wind breaks and other stuff, and a cafe to get your polystyrene cups of tea to warm you up.  There are donkey rides, too, but I only got them inadvertently in the background of a video I took of the kids playing football.

We also discovered this elegant Georgian crescent.