alphabet

The U is one of those characters of which not many materials or techniques excist. Utee - ultra thick embossing powder - is one of them so I decided to try this. My first attempt literally blew away when I switched on my heatgun. Second attempt was better. This time I started with applying some ink over the fabric before I sprinkled the Utee powder on it. The ink - or any other liquid - will hold the Utee to your fabric when you switch on the heatgun. I decided to combine the colors blue and green. Zapped it long enough so that the Utee melded. Let it cool down and finish it by stitching around the shape of the U.

alphabet

For the T I decided to use tyvek. I either recycle my envelops or I buy it. Depending on the type of tyvek there is a slight difference in the bubbles you get when you zap it. This piece of tyvek I painted both sides with different colors - don't ask me which type of paint or which colors I used because I have no idea. I did not keep any notes. When it was dry I used my heatgun to zap it. After this was done I cut out the shape of the T and stitched it to a piece of Black Kona.

discharging to white

Although most black fabrics discharge to tan while using bleach, it is possible to discharge it to white. Thanks to Laura Kemshall I found the proper fabric to do this. It is called H200 and is sold by Whaley in the UK.
Here you see some of the fabric I discharged today:

All pieces were fanfolded and different clips were used for clamping. For bleach I used different types of household bleach. For the first two pieces I used Glorix, for the third Witte Reus toiletcleaner. Glorix discharges much faster than the other brand, even though it is at least 6 months old.

alphabet

Today is for the S. For this I made silk paper using blue fibers and some little flowers in between. I stretched the fibers over some plastic covered with netting, sprinkled the flowers over it and added some more fibers. Glued everything together with wall paper paste and let it dry. The next day I cut the shape of the S and stitched it to my usual black fabric background.

alphabet

I got a bit behind with my alphabet pictures so instead of one picture every two weeks, I'll be showing you a few more in a short period.

This picture is for the R and I used rusted fabric for it. I love this technique although I always have problems to find rusted material. The fabric was soaked in vinegar and wrapped around something rusty - sorry I don't recall anymore what I used. After a couple of days I got the color I wanted. Rinsed the fabric, let it dry and fused it to some Bondaweb. Cut out the shape of the R and stitched it to the Kona black fabric.

home again

Today not a picture of something I created, but what I saw when I looked out of the window Saturday morning:

This snow is unusually early in the year, even for Minnesotans. Can't say that I was sorry to leave this white stuff behind. If you look at the pinetrees, you will see a male cardinal sitting in them. My journey home was a long one and now I am trying to catch up with all the news and getting over my jetlag.

more bleach and experiment

Yesterday Kelly and I used some more bleach on black Kona and discovered something new. According to a recent workshop I took, Kona discharges to rust/orange when using bleach but we managed to discharge it to this color:
And I don't know what you call it, but to me this is close to white. Each strip of fabric is 12" x 44" and had 6 knots in it. Knotting was not so bad to do, but unknotting wet fabric is no fun at all.By the way, the Kona is from JoAnn's. On this picture you can see how light it is compared to an earlier discharged piece of Kona:
Of course we wanted to know how this light color was achieved and after some thinking we came to the conclusion that either the strength of the bleach bath and/or the time the fabric was in the bath must have had to do something with it. We had not timed how long our pieces were in the bleach bath. To have all the information, after the bleach bath, the fabric was rinsed and soaked in anti-chlor. All the time it was knotted. When we unknotted the fabric - we each had around 7 strips with 6 knots each in it - the smell of bleach was still present. Unknotting took quite a long time. Neither of us is a chemist, but we came to the conclusion that in spite of the rinsing and the anti-chlor the bleach had been active all the time, which must have been between 1 and 2 hours.
This called for an experiment. We cut strips of fabric and made 4 bleach baths. One for 100%, one for 75%, one for 50% and one for 25%. The time we left the strips in the bleach bath was 30 seconds, 1 minute, 3 minutes and 10 minutes. On this picture you can see that the longer the fabric was in the bleach bath (bottom row) and the strongest the bleach bath was (left column) the lighter the fabric discharged to.

On this picture you see a strip which we did not timed, but it was in the bleach bath for more than 1 hour. You can also see, that the centre of the middle strip - which was knotted - continued discharging after rinsing and anti-chlor.There is one thing we will only know after some time and that is whether anti-chlor is strong enough to stop the effect of a 100% bleach bath. For us this experiment was very interesting

gellatin printing

Kelly and I played with gellatin printing yesterday. I had done this before using gellatin in a small container and only made marks on the surface. This time we used different grasses and leaves and we had a container about 9"x13". Here are some of the results we got:
The fabric at the left is the first print. The one at the right is made when the leaves and grasses were removed. I love these second prints! The texture of the leaves and grasses shows so much better.

At the moment I do not yet know for what I will use these prints, but I am thinking of combining them into a quilt. Maybe with a light colorwash over it to get rid of the white. This is definately a technique I will use more often in the future. The jello we used for this was years over the expiration date. Probably not edible anymore, but still good enough to use for gellatin printing :-)

rainbow fabric

Today's pictures show 2 one yard pieces I dyed last week during one of Carol's classes. For both pieces I used the same 3 pure primaries. Don't ask me which ones, because I don't have my notes with me. The dyes were mixed so that in total I had 12 cups of dye mixture. For the first picture I fanfolded the fabric lenghtwise, placed it into a 9"x13" plastic container - about 1/3 of the fabric fitted in - and started pouring the dye over it starting with yellow. In total 4 different cups. The next step was to fold part of the fabric which was still outside the cup over the other layer. First layer was done from the left to the right, the second from the right to the left. Again dye out of 4 cups was used. You can guess what the next step was I presume :-). The last remaining fabric was put into the container the same way and the remaining 4 dye cups were used. I did not scrunch the fabric, but only covered it with plastic and let it batch till the next day. Don't you love the result.
The 2nd piece of fabric was fanfolded lengthwise and placed onto a long piece of plastic. Dye was poured over it in the same sequence as above. Next step was to wrap it into plastic and leave it to batch till the next day. At the moment I have no clue for which project I will be using these fabrics, but I don't think I'll cut them up. They probably turn out into whole cloth quilts.