This and That

Here are some fabric scraps gathering ready for Jude Hill's Contemporary Woven Boro class and sorting through them is like taking a trip down memory lane for the last four years. I have alot of colour and fewer neutrals. I've also been basting fabric weavings and it's good to regain those pins, as I know I'll be needing them!

I've also been finishing my machine thread colour scales for my other class, and I overdyed these fabrics - adding bright green and magenta. They're more interesting now, but I may do another round of colour. I am curious about how different methods of dyeing compare to each other. I used low immersion methods here - with three hours of batching and a different recipe and the results are as vibrant as the tray dyeing. It seems to me there's room for alot of leeway.

And serenditpity plays a large role, too.

Holding the Tension of Opposites

The sun joined the moon in this window, today, and a stitched door also formed below it. I am going to be challenged taking two courses at once in what feels like such opposite directions. While Comtemporary Woven Boro doesn't begin for another week, the class blog is open and I want to ease into the spirit of that as well as carry on with samples and projects for the Mark Making With Machine course. I considered adding machine stitch to this - even felt intrigued and chose two potentials, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. I enjoy both handstitch and machine - but there is a very different feel to each. While I have combined them in other pieces - it has to feel right.

In class yesterday, we sorted our threads to sew samples of colour scales for value, temperature and intensity and we tray dyed fabrics in a pleated, swirled, scrunched and twisted fashion with two temperature variants of our chosen colour, as well as did a dye painted piece. For some unknown reason, my warmer red dye hardly gave any colour. I'd heard dyes have a shelf life, but I didn't believe it. I brought my batching fabrics home to rinse and iron before next week's class - partly because I also did a bucket full of a wide range of fabric samples, using the same two reds, plus a teal green and a pink, and I added a few other manipulations. Here is burlap, silk velvet, silk gauze, trims, a doily and crocheted squares. I was surprised at how purple came into the mix - because I had expected the two compliments of green and red to yield some browns - but considering my green was a teal, the blue in it was enough to tip the scale in the purple direction. Sometimes combining opposites can yield something unexpected!
From the same bucket, here is cheesecloth, silk ribbon, a variety of threads, scrim, some kind of chenille/towel fabric and rayon that was a pale green.

More dyes in a next post...