Food Fun

Today I tried natural dye stuff with Arashi Shibori - some rose petals, raspberry tea and onion skins. I kept seeing food in the results, too - ripple potato chips:and the icing swirls on top of a vanilla slice - must have been time for a snack!

Here's the whole, which was a light beige to begin with.

And I did a little Sekka Shibori using the Colourhue dyes.

More Shibori

Swimming in Shibori...

Arashi Shibori has such glorious texture - but I was too eager to see what pattern I'd made to let it dry this way. Maybe next time - maybe :)

This is the Maki Nui Shibori pictured in the top photo collage, now dyed and with stitching removed. A spotty, rather disappointing look. I have had very limited success with the stitched shibori, overall.

These dye painting and dipping experiments are samples to see what's possible.

Texture With Stitch

I decided to work with stitching a small piece of silk for Orinui Shibori. The transformation of the texture on this is amazing - a little bouncy, 3 D and alive! Almost a shame to pull those ties...The stitched side has interesting texture, too. It is now tightly bound into such a small bit that I made sure I placed it in my studio last night instead of leaving it on the coffee table in case someone might mistake it for a kleenex and toss it. I am excited to dye it because yesterday I got more colours of the Colorhue dye.

I also continue to stitch this cloth:

And I completed this - a moment of wonder in the early morning when it was snowing at the cove which you may recognize, as it's based on a photo I took and previously posted on this blog. Other then the rectangular outline, I didn't draw any of it with a marker but used my eye and the machine, as I wanted to keep it fresh and alive - and I wasn't going for an exact rendering:

This will be in the exhibition and sale at the Victoria College of Art beginning this Friday night and continuing in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday. Our class has covered alot of ground and there will be much to see, as well as all the work done by the other classes in various mediums.

Bare Bones

Alot can happen in a few days, and when I don't blog about it fairly promptly, my impetus to record it, fizzles, as I have moved on. Since my last entry, I have thread painted Tried Itajime shibori on wool and photo collaged it with this swan I met

Tried Mokume shibori on wool twice without getting a well defined pattern - perhaps felt's pile doesn't allow for the stitch lines to show well - or maybe there is something else I could try. I do love the look of resist dyed felt, though, and think it has alot of promise.

And here I was trying an overall shibori pattern on silk divided into six squares - three with blossoms and three with twelve lines of horizontal and vertical stitch. No clear pattern again, which was disappointing after all the stitching and knotting.

This last photo is from the Westshore Quilt Guild's show and is a machine from 1885 - love the curvy shape!

Exploring Further

More shaving cream and dye exploration - I'm pleased with the marbled look: And making this was an interesting discovery... combining drawing with dye.

Here I've overdyed with tumeric and when I compare this to the overdye with Procion yellow I did, I much prefer this because it's not as loud and the previous colour shows through here and there, creating more depth.

Disappearing Stitches

I had an idea to dye some itajime moons first with grey and than to stitch mokume style onto them and dye each a seperate colour of the rainbow. The first one with Colorhue dye worked out pretty well, although the colours aren't to my liking. I repeated the process, this time using yellow Procion and when I removed the stitching, no pattern was evident. I'm not sure why - maybe the necessary longer batching time for Procion allowed the colour to seep into the crevices beneath the stitching? Maybe Procion and stitched shibori do not work well together. You can see the differences in the photo below between the plain moon, the pink mokume one, yellow Procion and the last one I used shaving cream and dye to pattern drifting clouds over.

When I was using the shaving foam, I noticed an interesting pattern of the dyes I was using on a lid and put this moon in it. I like the orange glow at the edges of these clouds.

I also experimented with creating woodgrain and a grid pattern with the lower right silk.

This one I swirled to look like a wood knot.

Patterns

With the arrival of spring we are moving from darker days into more light. Signs like these new baby goats are emerging

and flowers.

The seasons are patterns in nature - interconnected as they merge from one to the next.

And some patterns are more spread out - long range, like last night's super moon.