Dreaming Spirals

A lot of you have expressed interest in my rust dyeing.

For me, Kimberly Baxter Packwood is the real rust guru and she has just published some guidelines on rust dyeing on her blog, as well as pictures of her rust dyed silk carrier rods and the work she has been doing with them. Check it out!

Another blog I like reading on rust dyeing is Lois’s at Rust-Tex. Her work is awesome too!

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Here is a collage of some of the tissue paper I have been painting.   (I did this in Picasa, not in cutting and pasting real paper!    Not yet, anyway.)

This is a photo of some corrogated card which I painted.  It looks like a Picasa collage on its own!

And, a bit late, here is the best rusted piece from the baking tray which was up in the loft catching the drips.  It is ironic, really, because it is a practice piece on which I was trying to transfer a picture printed on Lasertran (not very successfully).. but I think it looks like one of those old medieval maps.  Pity I could never repeat it if I tried! 

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On Monday I decided to do some dyeing with an indigo dyeing kit which I had bought several months ago.   Actually, I started thinking about it the previous Saturday and spent the best part of the morning tying little marbly things (they are actually playing counters for a game) into a piece of white cotton fabric.  The result was oddly satisfying, and I could see why people manipulated fabric or made the 3D sort of shibori - such as Michelle Griffiths who has her studio just west of where I live, in Llantrisant.

Here is the piece of fabric when I had finished tying it.  It was about a yard in length before I started.

I was so pleased with that one that I decided to use up the rest of the counters in a sort of flowing line on a long white silk scarf:

So on Monday I was all prepared.  I made up the indigo vat and decided to dip each piece several times for strength of colour.

Here is the first piece hanging on the line after dipping:

And some other pieces which I did:

The yarn is some white recycled sari silk.  That took the dye the best out of all of them.

Here is some fabric in the dyepot on the grass.  The good thing about this was that once I had prepared the vat I could do all the actual dipping in the garden and keep all the mess out there!

The second (or it may even be third by this time) dipping of my tied fabric.  The yarn is the pencil roving which I used for my felted bag.  It was put in when the indigo was nearly exhausted so is much paler.

I also put in a bit of my rusted fabric.  It is a lovely pale blue colour which complements the rust very well.  It was interesting to see that the rust seemed to act as a resist - or maybe it was just that the dye was so pale it didn’t affect it in any way.

I started untying the counters before I rinsed the fabric… here it is half untied - I quite like the effect!

Here it is fully untied but as yet unrinsed and wet:

I did untie some of the counters before dipping the second and third times - as you can see, there is a variation in shade of the circles.

And here it is, washed, dried and ironed and pinned up on my design wall.  As you can see, it is considerably paler.

And here is the silk scarf:

And a detail of the bottom part:

I’m not sure what I shall use these for yet - I will probably do more printing or dyeing over the top but I think I would like to leave the large piece whole.  Maybe even some rust dyeing?  I have some more pieces of fabric in the process of being rusted - now the roof has finally been fixed (we hope!) I am using up the rust from the baking tin which was collecting water underneath the window in the loft.  When that’s done I will slather it in oil to stop it rusting any more (I hope!).

Here they are in the process of rusting:

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Here is the onion skin-dyed yarn drying on the line.  Yummy colour, isn’t it?

Here it is dried and ready to use:

The colour is actually closer to the top picture.

And here is some more yarn being brought to a simmer - this has a mishmash of St Johns wort, the remains of the onion skin dyebath and a couple of nettle teabags which I chucked in for good measure!  Talk about unscientific… The yarn has been mordanted with copper.

It actually turned out a mid brown colour and is drying upstairs as I type.  Photo later.

Here is the half knitted to-be-felted bag.  I have still got about 30 rows to do and the yarn is disappearing at an alarming rate!

You will notice I have tweaked the blog colour a bit and made a few changes and additions to the sidebar.  If you find it isn’t behaving itself for you, do let me know.

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Here are several photos of the rust dyed fabric I did in the roasting tin which I had left on the floor in my studio to catch the drips from the leaking ceiling.

This is the main piece - a large piece of silk dupion which I tried unsuccessfully to rust round a washing line pole last year (probably because it promptly went cold and froze!).

This is the top of it.

And the bottom of it.

This is a small detail of the above piece.  This impression was made by one of the sweetcorn tins which DS1 had thrown out of his bedroom window!  A very effective print.

And another detail. 

This is an old silk shirt.

A detail of the sleeve portion. 

I don’t know what sort of fabric this is - it is a sort of knitted fabric - maybe rayon?  Or silk even…  That piece in the middle which is a slightly different shade is actually part of the rusting - not a different bit sewn on as it looks.

This piece, which is silk crepe de chine, went very grey-brown with rust-brown highlights.  It is so fine you can see the outline of the chair through it where the sun is shining!

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At last - we have photos!

This was dyed with blackberry leaves and a copper mordant.

This one was mordanted with alum and was dyed in the exhaust of the blackberry leaf dyebath.

This was dyed with an unknown hanging plant which I pulled up from the garden last summer and has been soaking all winter outside in water.

It didn’t get much colour, but it is a nice creamy shade.  There is definite colour when I put it next to the original.  It also was mordanted with alum. 

This next one had a bit of a chequered life because I mordanted it with alum and then dyed it in a forsythia dyebath which was almost completely useless.  I also added a pinch of iron for the last 15 minutes, but that didn’t improve it.  So I chucked some madder roots which I had been soaking into a sort of large herb sphere that I have (actually I think it is for steaming vegetables but it looks more like those things you can buy for infusing herb tea except bigger.   Except that some of the bits of madder root were too small and came out of the holes on to the yarn and the next day I got the whole lot out, put the madder into a muslin bag, rinsed the yarn, which now had patches of red on it but not entirely, and put it back into the madder bath.  You’re not supposed to heat the madder to more than about 50C so I just heated it up and then left it overnight.  I added another skein of yarn to get the exhaust. 

And here is the skein that was added later:

Here they all are together:

I’ve still got some yarn mordanted with copper and some more which is unmordanted yet so watch this space!  I’ve sent off for an indigo kit so I’m going to try that next…

This is the Kool Aid dyed yarn:

I put it in a microwave dish and poured the colours on as if I was space dyeing then heated it. 

For this next one I did the same but they seem to have more or less all gone into one or two shades…

And I overdyed some felt which I made about a year ago:

It was mostly to tone down the brilliant white colour of the back:

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Well, the skeins dyed so far look gorgeous - totally different to the colours you get with chemical dyes. The blackberry leaves came out a mid brown colour with the wool mordanted with copper and a gorgeous golden yellow in the exhaust bath with a skein mordanted with alum and cream of tartar. The skein dyed with some unidentified plant which has been soaking over winter in a black bin outside came out a sort of browny cream colour. Okay but not very exciting. This morning I cooked up some forsythia leaves which Jill Goodwin says ought to come out a nice green colour (A Dyer’s Manual). Though she reckoned the brown skein above ought to have been blue green and the alum skein pink so I don’t know what to believe! I will dye some wool with it tomorrow anyway.

I also had a busy afternoon dyeing with some Kool Aid which someone sent me in a swap ages ago. I did it in the microwave following these instructions. They were pretty effective too, but I don’t much like the sickly smell, which refused to go away despite about 5 rinsings… After seeing the natural dyed yarn I really don’t like the look of these chemical dyes very much - goodness knows what it does to kids’ stomachs!

So the washing line is pretty full at the moment!

If my camera doesn’t arrive soon I’ll dig out my old one, which now belongs to DS2, and take some photos with it…

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Well, I’ve been quiet but not inactive.  Still no camera but I’ve dug a few out of Picasa which I haven’t put on my blog yet….

The weather is absolutely glorious.    The garden is lovely.  We have two red tulips which I thought I’d killed off by planting my herb garden where they were, but they seem to have come up this year, the first time for three years.    Here’s a photo of them in previous years:

I bought a couple of blueberry plants in the last two farmers’ markets in town (one at a time, all I could carry up the hill to my house!).  Here is one of them waiting on the patio to be planted out.    Our soil is very acid and apparently they like acid soils so they should do well.

Because the weather has been warm, I have been doing some natural dyeing (or at least preparing for it) over the last couple of days, so I could boil stuff up while leaving the kitchen door open.

I bought this gorgeous pencil roving from Crown Mountain Farms via a yarn coop I am in.  I want to dye it and then knit it into a bag and felt it. 

Here it is wound into skeins ready for dyeing.  Yesterday I washed it and mordanted some in alum and some in copper and picked a lot (A LOT!!) of blackberry brambles which were running wild in our front garden.  I was attacked in the forehead by a rampaging yukka plant and have lots of scratches to show for the battles with the brambles but now they have been safely boiled up and I am just waiting for the water to cool sufficiently to put one of the skeins in.  I’ve got some madder to dye some more skeins … photos when Nikon duly releases my camera!  Hopefully…. 

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