Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas, I took this photo in the autumn, I thought it looked Christmassy with the holly and I really liked the carving on the grave stone.

I have just got to the end of the module for my degree course, we just get feed back on our work at this stage, I'm very pleased with mine.

I will be back in blogging and dyeing in the New Year.

Moving towards designing.

I have been working on my contribution of dyed fabric for our collaborative piece. Here is a picture.
They are both cotton sateen, the one on the left, has been dyed with a very pale indigo blue and then tied with cocktail sticks, starting with a large one and gradually working down.
The one on the right has a flour paste resist pattern, that has been dyed with ferrous sulphate and then tannic acid, the left hand side has been dyed with indigo followed by weld to give the green colour. Finally I painted some ferrous sulphate and then taanic acid down both sides.
They are both about 3 feet long.

The others who have come to the dyeing days have some lovely fabrics, I can't wait to see them all together in January. I have started to get some ideas about designs, I hope the others have too.

There is a very interesting exhibition at the RA at the moment, EARTH Art of Climate Change, it has work by a number of well known artists, Anthony Gormley, Mona Hatoum as well as some new artists. Tracey Emin has some embroidered textiles. Some are very beautiful and when you look more closely disturbing. Like Yao Lu's work. At first sight it looks like a classical Chinese ink painting, but when you look more closely you can see that the mountains are actually mounds of rubbish covered with green protective nets. His work is very clever and speaks of the radical changes affecting modern China.  

Our second workshop

We did some over dyeing cochineal over weld and indigo over weld. Here are our samples in the cochineal vat.






The photo below is the yellow sample with bits of plastic sticking out of it.

It is silk satin organza that was stitched and tied with string. Silk takes the dye particularly well.

This sample is cotton dyed with weld, in the same vat as the sample above, it had split lentils tied into before it was over dyed with indigo. You don't have to heat indigo to get the colour, split lentils wouldn't have worked so well in the cochineal as it does have to be heated. We could have had cochineal and lentil soup for lunch!!   

This sample is Cotton, dyed partly with weld, with some tying with plastic and some without and also some bleaching back, it does look like various sorts of lichen, well done Catherina.

We have got lots of lovely fabrics to go on to the next stage, designing the collaborative piece or pieces. Seeing all the fabrics and looking at the photographs again has given me some exciting ideas. I'm looking forward to January.

Our next Natural Dyeing workshop

Next Saturday we will have our next workshop we will be using new colours, yellow, green and red and doing some over dyeing and bleaching back.

I did a demonstration of this piece of fabric at the last workshop. I dyed it with indigo, leaving the top right hand area white and then dyed it in a jam jar with iron and tannin. Recently I have dyed it with weld to give the yellow and green where the weld has over dyed the indigo. I then tied off small circles [around buttons] and covered them with plastic before dyeing with iron and tannin again.  I hoped it would look like lichen on stone.