Wordless Wednesday

jacket

After having the same jacket for a number of years, I wanted a new one so I started looking both in shops as well as online for a new one. The only ones I could find in my size were trench coats in either grey or beige. Hmm not really what I was hooping for. The option which remained was to make one myself. That way I could pick the model and the color I wanted.  Dharma sells a pfd denim and of course procion dyes in every color you want :-)

Garment making is not my hobby, but I know how to do it. I stitched the jacket using a cotton thread and when it was done, I tied balls in it with rubber band. Soaked it into soda ash and put it into a big container. The next step was to put lots and lots of ice cubes in the container as well. No idea how many, but it was the biggest bag they had at the gas station. The next day all the ice cubes had melted and it was time to put the jacket into the washing machine. This is how it turned out.
For colors I had decided upon teal, turquoise and aqua marine - in total 8 oz. By using different colors within the same color range, you can create depth more than when using a single color.

Wordless Wednesday

tree

Most of the time I am working on multiple projects. This way I can vary different techniques. For the last 6 weeks I have been working on this tree:

It is grey lutradur with a batting under it. And as you can see on this detail photo it is not my normal technique, but I have been hand embroidering this one.

When it was hanging on the design wall it was easy to add the branches to it, but when that was done I moved it over to the place where I wanted it. It is now glued onto a door in my hall way:

Glueing something on a flat surface is easy, as long as the surface is horizontal. Glueing this tree on a vertical surface was rather difficult :-)

Circles

Last month I created several pieces of fabric, which will keep me quilting for quite some time :-). With soy wax and a partly cut bristle brush I prepared a screen for printing. For the first fabric I used a blah snow dyed fabric which definately improved with this print. No idea yet what I will do with it.

Another piece of fabric was a long strip. I printed 3 purple circles on it and for the 2nd layer I used a golden metalic fabric paint. It is serendipity that the blue and pink showed up. A surprise I really liked. After the fabric had dried, I gave it a light silver/white colorwash.  I quilted this using - again - circles and this is how it now looks:

Here is a detail:

No idea yet what the title will be. I understand that when people work in series that they number their pieces. Not very original, but much easier than finding a new title every time again :-).

Wordless Wednesday

Discharge

When I discharge a hand dyed piece of fabric, I can estimate the color to which it will discharge - as long as I use pure colors or know which pure colors have been used. With commercial fabric it is always a surprise. This time I ended up with some gorgeous fabric. The fabric was wet and I applied the bleach using a small syringe. Look how it turned out:

On the selvage were mentioned the names Nancy Crow and Kent Avery but an online search for this fabric lead to no results. If you know where this fabric can be bought, please let me know. I would love to have a couple of more yards to play with.

As it is Friday I am linking this post to Nina-Marie Off the Wall Friday

Wordless Wednesday

Art quilting book

During my holidays the mail brought me this book:

This book - written by Linda Seward - is indeed the ultimate guide. If you want a book which combines all the techniques there are for art quilting, this is the book to buy.  Normally I start on page 1, but this time I went to page 93 first as one of  my quilts is shown there:

I created this quilt in 2012 but on purpose I did not blog about it. Keeping a secret can be difficult :-), but at last I can show the quilt. It is made from a part of a hand dyed piece of fabric. With snow dyeing you never know how the result will be and with this half yard I was very lucky. The quilting and seed beads highlight the patterns of the fabric.

fabric and concrete

Fabric and concrete is not a combination you would think of, but I had fun with this experiment and I think it works rather well :-). I did some hand embroidery - or maybe making marks is a better word for it - on some small pieces of fabric. The fabric is hand dyed and the embroidery thread is pearl cotton. When they were done I wanted to do more with them. I stapled them onto stretched canvas and than it was time for the fun part :-). I mixed some concrete with a bit of water and acrylic paint. Normally concrete is grey and I wanted a more interesting color. Painting over the concrete after it had dried would be difficult as I did not wanted to paint the fabric. Mmmm, I might do this with another test piece.
Anyway I discovered that it is easier to mix a darker color of paint with the concrete than a light one. In the first picture I added pink acrylic paint to the concrete, in the second one blue acrylic paint.
Next step was to use a credit card to apply the concrete to the fabric. On purpose I applied the concrete uneven. When it had dried it was a bit more even, but the texture is still visible. Each canvas is 8" x 8". Here are the pictures:

Sorry, but I forgot to take pictures before I applied the concrete. I think this is an experiment which turned out rather pretty. They are not complete yet. I think they will benefit if some embellishments are added.

Drip dyeing

It is always fun to play with a new technique or with a twist to a know technique. Here are 2 pictures of fabrics I dyed using the drip dye technique. Both are roughly 0,5 yard pieces. 

For the first one I used cloth pins to hang the fabric landscape wise and applied the dye with a syringe. I started with the yellow one. Sprayed some extra water on it, so that the paint could drip down over the fabric. After some time I turned the fabric around and did the same with the blue paint. Where the colors met they created the green.

 For the second one I did it differently. Again using the same blue and yellow. This time I put one part of the fabric in a container with yellow dye and the other one in a container with blue dye. After some time I checked the fabric, but not much had happened. I did not want to wait to see if some more mingling would happen so I dumped the fabric into another container and let the dye do it's work like that. And see what result I got:

It turned out into a gorgeous piece of fabric. Using the same colors of dye I got 2 completely different pieces of fabric. Takes notes is something I easily forget. I know that the blue I used was intense blue, I am not certain which yellow I used. Probably golden yellow.