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Magic

Well, the real term is ‘eco dyeing’, but it feels like magic. In my previous post about Summer camp, I touched on eco dyeing and promised I would elaborate later. Seeing as it is currently one of my favourite things to do, I have been busy and have lots of pictures to share!

Top: *Water lilies* Bottom: *wet blanket*

Water lilies are taking first place for my favourite eco dye leaves. Earlier, I used water lily leaves and stems on a dry piece of cotton, covered with a ‘wet blanket’ (cotton soaked in iron solution). I loved both the leaf print itself, and the impression that was left on the blanket. Interesting how the green of the leaves showed up, but I also like the dark impressions and detail on the blanket.

With visions of Monet dancing in my head, I was inspired to use water lilies in a bigger project. To start, I would have to gather some lily pads, so we set out in our kayaks to forage on a calm and sunny day. It took no time at all to fill the kayak with lily pads of all sizes. I may have overdone it, maybe a kayak full wasn’t necessary, but I would have lots to chose from.

Back on dry land, I put the lilies into a 5-gallon bucket of water to transport them home and kept them in the bucket overnight until I was ready to try the roll up.

I had recently purchased a 100% cotton sundress and could picture water lilies floating up from the hem on a cool summer day.

Enough of the dreamy visioning though, my mind turned to planning out the technicalities of how to turn my vision into reality. As always, I started with the end and thought backwards. You may think this is a trick used only in computer programming, or reverse engineering, but don’t let that scare you off. Thinking backwards is a great way to come up with challenges to solve. Basically, it means thinking of where, or what, you want to end with and then planning all the steps to get there. I try to remind myself that when you want a functional outcome, this crucial first step gives better results than just ‘throwing it all together and seeing what comes out’!

When thinking about my final piece, how it would look on a moving body; how it would fit into my wardrobe colour scheme; how it would wash; how to best highlight the beauty of lily pads; I came up with a few challenges:

How could I get a permanent, beautiful background colour, without the orange tinge of the iron dye interfering?
How should I lay out the leaves to give the desired effect of carefully balanced/random placement?
How could I work with a ready made dress that has pockets, neck and arm binding and a hem, each with a subtly different thickness and texture?
How would I print the front and the back of the dress, without the prints bleeding through and muddying each other?
How should I apply the iron water? Would it be better to use a wet blanket, or wet the leaves, or wet the dress?
How would I get the mirror image effect on the front and back of the dress, not on a wet blanket?
How would I roll the leaves and dress up for steaming without creating creases in my prints?

I can tell you, this took some thinking. As I played out the process in my mind, each challenge seemed to present another sub-challenge. I’ll spare you all of that rumination and just share with you the steps I settled on.

Oh yes, one final thing that I often have to do to move myself from planning to executing: Consider the worst case scenario. It could end up as one big mess. But, in this case, all I will have lost is a cheap cotton dress and some time. At some point, you do have to just plunge in and take the first step, remembering that this is all a big experiment, and it’s meant to be fun!

With the dress being a dress, it had seams, arm holes and a neck hole to contend with, and I wanted a mirror image print on the front and back of the dress so I had to figure out how to use the same leaves, keep them from bleeding through where I didn’t want them, and not waste their print on a wet blanket.

First, I soaked the whole dress in an iron water solution and wrung it out until damp. To make the most of the strength of the print, and to make sure it showed on the right side of the pockets (not the inside), I turned the dress inside out, and placed the leaves sandwich style between the front and back so they would have direct contact with both the front and the back. I started with the biggest on the bottom near the hem and floated up to smaller ones near one shoulder in a bit of a wavy drift.

I knew the print would come through to the backside of the fabric and didn’t mind that, but I didn’t want bleed through when I rolled up the bundle. I have been using saran wrap to block in my smaller pieces, but the dress seemed too big for that so I decided to try using parchment paper and it worked a charm. I laid out enough paper to cover both the front and the back completely. In essence, I now had a five-layer sandwich: paper, dress back, leaves, dress front, paper.

*Bonus: the waste parchment paper was beautiful!*

The piece was now ready to roll so I chose the longest stick that would fit in my steamer. I carefully folded in the sides of the dress to make it as evenly thick as possible and about 12 inches wide. This was rolled onto the stick, and bound as tightly as possible with string. Next, I popped it into the steamer and waited, ever-so patiently, for 90 minutes…plus another half hour or so for cooling. Then, the great reveal!

The biggest surprise at this step was beauty of the waste parchment paper which had blocked the bleeding by picking up the print. I’ll definitely be using this later.

*Round one: lily leaves on iron rust background*

As for the dress itself, I was pleased with the basic outcome. The leaves were well defined in tones of purplish black. As anticipated, the main colour of the dress was a pale orange from the iron water. I briefly considered leaving it this way, but really the dress is for me and I am pretty much stuck on blues, I still had a water image in my mind, and orange wasn’t very ‘Monet’.

The easiest solution, given my recent foray into indigo dyeing, was to give the dress a few dips in the indigo vat hoping that blue over light orange might make a nice blueish green. Things looked promising when the dress was hung on the line, but after the first rinse and dry, the indigo faded quite a bit (possibly the vat had been tired), and too much of the iron orange was showing through muddying the colour.

*First over dye with indigo became much paler when rinsed*

*Procion mx dye: electric blue & sun yellow*

OK, one more try. Third time’s a charm right? I decided to deviate from the natural path and treat the dress with a bath in Procion mx dye. I soaked the dress in a soda ash solution for 20 minutes to ensure colour fastness, and then put it in the dye to ‘stew’ overnight. Next morning, a rinse in ice water, hand washing, line drying and a hot ironing finished it off.

Finally, the dress was finished! I love the blue/green background, and the front and back mirror image. A bit of the underlying rust shows through, but I think it adds to the richness of the water effect.

What do you think?

Summer camp

I’ve never been to summer camp. When I was about six or seven, I would occasionally whine, or beg, to be allowed to join the small groups of sunburned kids who were trailing behind their camp counsellors at the local beach, but it never happened.

My mother thought it was much more fun for us to have free range during the summer when our cousins came up for their annual visit from Toronto to Muskoka. Now, I think she was probably right. We lolled at the beach, lathered up with Noxema and taught ourselves to swim; tramped through the woods, braved black flies to gather plump, delicious raspberries for homemade jam; and made costumes and sets for basement productions of plays and performances.

But, the latent desire for summer camp has lingered.

Who says you are too old to attend camp as a senior?

This summer, the perfect opportunity presented itself. As a birthday gift, my husband/advocate registered me for a week-long fabric dyeing creative workshop offered at our local art centre (http://the tett centre for creativity and learning). The event was billed as a retreat, but I’m calling it camp for a check on my bucket list. It was a full five days of fun with like-minded friends, led by artist in residence Bethany Garner facebook.com.garner.bethany

Let the fun begin. About sixteen of us gathered at the Tett to experiment, play and learn, trying out a different dye technique or fabric treatment every day. I think we all arrived half and hour early, dropped off by our devoted spouses, or carpooling with friends. We each hauled in bags and carts of supplies, materials, and gear. We chose our tables, set up camp, checked out the hearty stash of communal supplies, and anxiously waited to dive in. Part of the fun was that each participant brought their own wealth of knowledge and area of expertise and even though each one of us was totally absorbed with our project of the day, no one hesitated to share information, or technique, or a special tool when asked. Great friendships were made and our collective creative network was widened….see, just like camp!

Let me take you through the week and share a few pictures. I’m sure I’ll write some other blogs on the specifics of techniques, or to update you on what I do with all the fabric I’ve generated, but for now, lets stick to the fun of playing and learning at camp.

Day One Flat Dyeing. Admittedly, I had only a very vague idea what this would be, but it sounded like fun. Basically, it involves laying out pre-soaked pieces of cloth on a table, pouring dye on the fabric and moving it around with your gloved hands. A little like finger painting for grown ups.

*layer dyed pieces between plastic* *and let sit for at least 48 hours*

The wet fabric was wrapped and left to sit for 48 hours and the results were like surprise packages when unwrapped, rinsed and dried.

I am thrilled with the colours and the possibilities for creating fabric pictures with these pieces waiting for project designation. Good thing I like the results because I do have a bit of a stack!

Day Two Mark Making. Hmm, what would this entail?? Well as always with Bethany, lots of options were laid out and then everyone was left to take their own path. The intent was to make marks, on paper or on fabric, again with a big emphasis on playing. There were lots of fabric dyes, markers, pens, paints, brushes and books for available for incentive. My new friend Marilyn did a wonderful series of marks by experimenting with black inks and brushes.

I decided to try gelli plate printing. Sounds fun and easy, right? Well, this was my least favourite. It wasn’t quite as easy as it looked on YouTube. Rather than buy a commercial gelli plate, which was a bit pricey, I decided to try an easy homemade recipe using gelatin and glycerine. I should have taken it as a bad omen when in order to economize, rather than buying a package of knox gelatin, I went to bulk barn and put a hefty scoop in a bag. What I didn’t realize until I got home: 1. I only needed 30g, 2. one hefty scoop of bulk gelatin goes for about $15. Well, on the optimistic side, if I took to gelli plate printing, I’d be set for a lifetime supply of gelatin. Unfortunately, I didn’t take to gelli plate printing. Very early in the game, my homemade gelli plate split into pieces–likely not thick enough, pretty disheartening. My friend Marilyn came to the rescue and loaned me her commercial gelli plate, and I gave it my best shot, but my pieces just seemed to come out a mess. I was glad I was only practicing on paper. I will try again, because if you google gelli plate printing as I did, you will see lots of exciting possibilities. And it’s not like I’m short on gelatin.

Day Three Eco Dyeing. OK, I’ll admit it. I jumped the gun on this one and it is easily my favourite to be added to current obsessions. With no clue of what eco dyeing was, I started to prowl around on the web and a couple of weeks before camp, I started on my own. I was mostly inspired by http://MadeByBarb.com where you can find all kinds of recipes and directions. Eco dyeing is magic–or for those of you with a more scientific bent, a reaction between ferrous (iron) and tannins (found in foliage) catalysed by heat and pressure, which looks like magic. Of course being keen on both magic and science, I couldn’t wait for camp and jumped into experimentation on my own. The basics involve laying foliage (rose leaves, oak leaves, water lilies, sumac, worked best for me) on natural fibre cloth (I used old cotton pillow cases); adding ‘iron water’ (ferrous sulphate and water, or water vinegar and old rusty metal bits) either by wetting the leaves or wetting the fabric; rolling up around a fat stick as tight as you can; and steaming for 90 minutes. **Caution: if you try this you are playing with chemicals. Please wear a mask and gloves and use caution as always when cooking with steam. I promise I’ll do a blog with more specific directions later. The results are pretty magical.

Fellow camper and artist Shirley had great success using mixed foliage including horse chestnut and black walnut leaves.

Day Four Wet Felting. This was something I had been wanting to try for a while. As you know from Art with a view I recently tried dry felting and really liked it. Wet felting is a bit more tactile and I knew we were in for a treat. Felting is what happens when you toss a wool blanket, sweater, or socks into the washing machine by mistake and end up with a 3-4 times smaller, densely matted and ruined piece–we’ve all been there.

But, the good news is you can make beautiful art by purposely felting! You start with wool roving, which is fluffy, unspun wool, available in all colours and many different weights and textures. Felting happens when wool fibres tangle up together and shrink to form a tight mat. When you are doing a more controlled method than the agitation of your washing machine, you use warm water, liquid soap, bubble wrap and lots of hand agitation.

After wetting down the fibres with warm water and soap, you massage it with your fingers to do the initial ‘bonding’. This is the fun part, a bit like sensory play.

Next comes a bit of work. You roll your piece up in bubble wrap and start to roll/slam/knead it, first in one direction, then in the next until it has been thoroughly rolled in all four directions. When you are done, ta da, more magic, the piece has shrunken in size and matted into a nice piece of felt.

Now if you were paying attention, you noticed that in the early stages of this piece I was planning on a dark blue angry sea and wispy white clouds. Well, in the vein of Things rarely go as planned, I ended up liking this better upside down and it will now be a snow scape with dark winter sky. I’m intending to go back to this piece to hand stitch some silver stars and use a bit of machine over stitching to define detail.

Day Five Choose Your Own Adventure. Let’s face it, one of the reasons my mother knew I wouldn’t cut it at summer camp is because I have difficulty following prescribed directions. So, day five was my kind of day! I decided to veer off and work with all the handmade paper I had generated in June –see previous Art with a view for details of that adventure. Inspired by how earlier in the week while flat dyeing the clean-up paper towels had absorbed the dyes so beautifully, I started playing around with dyeing my rough paper. I don’t know what I’ll use these papers for, but I sure had a lot of fun making them, and one woman’s mess is another woman’s ??? I may transform them into cards, or journal covers or who knows what!

The End. All good things must come to and end, and much like any campers we were exhausted, but fulfilled. We learned new skills, shared ideas, forged friendships and imagined the possibilities for future get togethers. A good time was had by all! Thanks to everyone who contributed to a fantastic week!

Mend your way

I started sewing when I was very young. Likely five or six, but most definitely before I was seven. My mother started me off with embroidery. I remember embellishing tea towels and pillow cases as I learned the basic stitches, lazy daisy being my favorite because of the name. My Barbie dolls wore a variety of couturier outfits and gowns crafted from socks and scraps.

I have very early memories of visiting my aunt, and being enthralled with her darning and mending. As the eldest of my mother’s sisters, Auntie Al had lived through the depression and the second world war as a young adult and had learned skills for economy. Handwork for her was not a pastime, it was work. Not only did she knit socks on a square of four slim needles, but she also had bobbins and sewing needles of all sizes, a basket of wool scraps, and a perfect egg-shaped piece of wood on a stick. This ‘darning egg’ was used when carefully weaving wool into the heels of old worn socks to restore them for use. Although my fingers were itching to touch these treasures, I don’t remember her teaching me. As with all things, she had a very strict “look but don’t touch” policy for children. I did however watch for hours, spellbound and recording her skills in my memory.

In my teens, the 1970’s saw a resurgence of sewing and patching and embroidering, but mostly for decorative purposes, never for repair or from necessity or desire to reuse and recycle. In most cases, seemed more about cutting up new things to make them look old.

These days, with my rekindled love of hand sewing, I am aware of the ‘slow fashion’ movement. From the ecological sustainability stance there is a growing concern with the detrimental effects of fast, cheap, exploitative fashion and an urging for people to return to more local, natural and ethically sourced quality fashions. With this of course comes the desire to make those quality fashions last as long as possible by, you guessed it, mending!

My first adventure into mending for purpose was an attempt to save a beloved pair of Japanese wool socks. They seemed an extravagance when I bought them, but they’ve kept my feet cozy for almost a decade and I love them. I noticed the heels wearing thin and thought I’d soon have to part with them. That’s when I remembered the wool, the egg, and my aunt’s patient weaving of patches into old socks to create new heels. I wish I knew where that darning egg was today! No worries, online shopping has everything and I soon found a wooden darning mushroom that does the trick.

Hmm, this mending with purpose was getting interesting and I went on a hunt for clothes that needed some TLC. I remembered a beautiful wool sweater, this piece pushing 20 years. It had last been seen somewhere in the basement and that’s where I found it in a heap and riddled with moth holes. I had always loved the soft luxury of this sweater and I guess that is why I’d never been able to part with it. It’s important when mending to use fabrics of like weight and composition and for this one I was lucky to find some muted, earth tone remnants of wool in my stash that went perfectly with the soft charcoal sweater. Some of the holes were sizable, but with the weight and thickness of the wool, and by letting the holes dictate the placement, I was able to fill the sweater with a field of wild flowers.

Of course, I’ve been reading up on techniques that go beyond lazy daisy and basic embroidery stitches. Seems the only thing I love buying more than fabric is books and I promise to give you a few recommended titles at the end of this blog.

Sashiko, is a traditional Japanese technique that uses the design principles of simplicity and repetition. It is recognizable as patterns of precise white stitching on indigo fabrics. Boro, another Japanese technique, uses sashiko stiches to secure patches under and over holes in old clothing. Rather than being hidden as invisible mending, both of these techniques add not only to the strength and durability of fabric, but also to its beauty. There are lots of books available to explain the techniques in detail and a quick internet search will produce some beautiful images. A few old pairs of pajama bottoms that had blown out large tears in the rump provided me the opportunity to give it a try. I adapted the ideas of shashiko and boro to suit my purpose.

In the spirit of slow fashion, sustainability, and being an eco-friend, I’m trying to convert to buying only ‘real’ fiber fashions. This will mean a return to more pure and blended cottons, linens and wool. I admit to a preference for these fibers, but I need to work at the price adjustment. A newly acquired cashmere/cotton sweater, after only about three wears, snagged and got a dime-size hole right on the front hem. Time to toss it? Noooo, not with my burgeoning mending skills. I tried free-style stitching, first in a pink lazy daisy stitch to replicate the knit, and then overlaying with a random blue and purple pattern to add depth. Looks a bit like a scribble, but I like it. This bespoke patch now adorns my hemline, waiting for the day when the sweater calls for more.

It can be tricky ordering books electronically, without being able to flip through them and carefully weigh their content/illustration/value balance. I have come across two favorites to recommend if you want to give mending a try.

The first, Visible Mending, Repair, Renew, Reuse The Clothes You Love, by Arounna Khounnoraj offers suggestions for basic equipment, a good primer of stiches and a nice breadth of techniques. The second half of the book is the ‘how-to’ for a large number of projects to try out the techniques. This section gives the beginner step-by-step instruction for specific projects, but could also be a jumping off point for more the experienced.

The second, I regrettably purchased in electronic form. I say regrettably, because I ended up liking this little book so much I wish I had it in hard copy for quick reference and to lend to others. Mending Life, A Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts, by Nina and Sonya Montenegro is a small, fun book that advocates for repairing and mending rather than discarding and replacing clothes. Offered through a series of family stories and memories, the sisters give solid information on basic equipment and techniques simple enough for a child or beginner, but thorough enough to be useful even to a seasoned sewer. This handbook offers instruction on darning, patching and other common repairs as well as altering, hemming and adding pockets! For those of you in the Kingston area, I spotted a hard-cover copy of this little gem in Novel Idea, our local, independent bookstore.

I hope this inspires you to mend your way (pardon the pun) into reclaiming, reusing, and recycling fashion. Have fun and enjoy the everyday beauty of your work!

Creating the Beast

After the disappointment of my curb-side pickup, I knew I would soon need an in-person top up of retail therapy and it wasn’t long coming.

I thought if I could get one, maybe two, pieces of faux fur trim, I could whip up a quick hat or bandeau, using some of my newly acquired woolen fabric pieces. A short, cautious shopping trip could be beneficial.

I admit I do prefer real fur, but it is increasingly difficult to find and a bit cost prohibitive. There are some very ‘real looking’ faux furs on the market, but faux fur is definitely not something you buy without feeling it and seeing it; checking the colour, the luster, the softness. I certainly wouldn’t want anything that looks too faux!

These were reasons enough to send me off to the shop.

Long story short, modern faux are surprisingly delicious. Soft, silky, fluffy, luxurious even. In less than thirty minutes I was able to amass a very large bagful of irresistible trims, and pelts.

*Let’s say I am set for faux fur for a while!*

Now to create! I was picturing a toasty warm vest. Fur exterior, woolen interior. A vest would be quick and easy, right? Let this be the lesson: nothing is ever as quick, nor as easy, as you expect. Creating, as I’ve said before, takes time…oodles of time.

Here are a few more tips for successful creating:

Make a pattern. It is always worth it in the end to measure properly and make a pattern. This will make good use of all the home delivery wrapping papers you have saved.
Try to think ahead of the logistics: will it have closure fastenings? will it have pockets? do you have enough fabric? do the weights and textures of all the fabrics work together?
At a certain point, you have to jump in and make the first cut. What is the worst that can happen? (It’s not like you don’t have more fur!)

I’ll try to speed it up for those of you who are anxious to see the final piece.

I did make a pattern, and chose my only 1 meter length of heavy, long-haired fur. Determined to use the non-boiled wool from my stash, gold went well with the fur, but having only .5m I had to supplement it with .5m of faux leather for the lining and trim. The colour was a perfect match and I figured, once committed to faux why not go all the way?

I had decided on pockets, but didn’t have enough fabric, so this is where it got interesting. I decided to use the sizable bag of onion skins I’d been saving in the bottom of our fridge to try onion skin dying on a recycled, old, cotton flannel bag.

Boil onion skins for about an hour (more skins = darker colour).
Strain out the skins.
Put the dark liquid in a pot large enough to allow your fabric to move around.
Wet the fabric (with water) and then add it to the dye pot.
Boil for about an hour, or until it is slightly darker than your desired colour.
Rinse thoroughly with cold water.
Keep the leftover dye for one or two days in case you come up with anything else you want to dye–after that you’ll have to toss it out (it is basically onion water).
That’s it! This step was easy–but not quick.

I decided I did want some closures and hunted around the house for something the right size until I came up with the clothes pegs to toggles idea.

Cut the pegs to the desired length, and drill holes for your thread or elastic (useful to have a carpenter on hand for this step).
Throw the toggles into the left over dye bath for an hour or so, and they will be the perfect colour!
The thinner, lower parts of the pegs worked best for this piece, but I’ve kept the upper pieces for a future project.
Attach the toggles with some elastic cord to allow leeway in buttoning.
Sew some reinforcement on your faux leather to add strength.
Tie the toggles only to the inside so they don’t show when vest is worn fur-side out.

I folded the fur inward around all the openings (hem, armholes, collar) so the vest could be reversible.

*Leather bound arm holes, inside plaquette and hem make the vest fully reversible.*

Voila! Not quick, and not necessarily easy, but the Beast is born. I am now the proud owner of a toasty, full-length, reversible, faux fur vest, which only took about 100 hours, and should last 100 years, or maybe more. It is faux after all.