Indigo & Dips, Shoe Hounds and Rain

In my last post I inadvertantly said 46 dips of indigo, no that's supposed to be 4 to 6 dips in the indigo bath. I used Instant Indigo, I love the stuff, and so do my customers it flies out of the store and fast!

I bought a new pair of shoes today, my Nikes are getting worn, both pairs. Last weekend I bought a new pair of Chaco's (the kind w/the toe strap), but there are times when I need something dressier. I need to send one pair of Chaco's off to be resoled, who knows maybe they will throw in new straps for kicks and giggles, that may be asking a bit much.

So today I went shoe shopping, I'm a bona fide shoe hound, and the blacker the shoe the happier I am. I bought a pair of burgandy Naots today, burgandy it's the new black!!! These have to be the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn, I love them. I also suspect they were designed by a woman having hot flashes, the model I bought "Rome" has little side vents on them, so your feet can breathe, what a novel concept.

It's raining turtles and fish again, and here I was worried we were going to have a drought year. I'm still using water conservative methods when it comes to dyeing, I wish I could say the same thing about rinsing out the wool yarn. Unlike everything else I dye I can't stick it in the washing machine to wash/risne. There has to be a better way of risning the yarn so I'm not using as much water.

Some of the yarn I've been dyeing. All of the yarns are wool or a wool/mohair blend. 

Dyeing yarn and more dyeing

I've been dyeing yarn for a couple of days now, I've had a lot of requests from specialty yarn shops for my yarn. So it's time to get busy, as it twere. I like the varigation I got on this last batch of textures. I dyed the various wool yarns with Buckthorn Bark and Osage Orange Extract, with an over dye of Indigo; probably 46 dips on the indigo.

My next project, from one of my Prairie Starter Kits. The compost dyed fabric in the back center is begging to be transformed into a forest scene. 

Some tag art in progress, the white chunky stuff is modeling paste. 

Painted Wonder Under, I did light washes with the Liquitex Paints and Createx Paints. I also stamped it with one of my hand carved stamps. 

Three different colors of Angelina, melted between layers of parchment paper. It will eventually be bonded to a chiffon scarf and stitched to something. 

Same Piece of Fabric now with a background wash of golden yellow Seta Color Paint. It was lacking before, and it still needs help. 

A piece of cotton painted with Seta Color Paints, Liquitex Paints and Jacquard Lumierie Paints.  

One of those days

Today was one of those days, allergies and a migrane just don't mix.

Tonight I decided to play with some materials, mainly using some techniques from Raising the Suface by Maggie Grey (http://www.prairiefibers.com if you want to buy a copy). I finally found a shop in town that sells second hand nylon scarves. Temperature is critical when ironing them otherwise they just disappear.

Right now everything is drying, I will paint, and dye, more fabrics, fibers, and tyvek tomorrow. Tonight I painted some Wonder Under, a chiffon scarf, a piece of cotton fabric and I applied Tsukineko inks to some lace. I also melted some Angelina fibers, between two sheets of parchment. I applied some shiva paintstiks (available on my webstore) to the Wonder Under, it is very interesting to say the least.

Over all I think I need to dye, paint, and ink up more colors so I will have a larger selection of pieces to select for stitching.

Dyeing with Onion Skins

Lets say you decided to dye some fabrics, cotton of course, with onion skins this weekend and failed to pre-mordant your fabrics, or prescour for that matter. Your attempts at dyeing with onion skins is not all loss.

You can actually take your fabric and post mordant it using alum and tannin. When dyeing cotton fabric with onion I use alum, onions have a good amount of tannin.

Assuming you have about a pounds worth of cotton fabric (The weight varies depending on the weave and width of the fabric) wet it out really well and then place it into your dyepot with 1 ounce of alum and enough water to adequetly cover your fabric.

Bring the fabric to just under a boil and let it simmer for two hours. This should be suffecient to retain color. You will probably loose some of the color from your initial attempts, or it may become even darker.

If you want you can add more onion skins at this point. NOTE: Your onion skins will give the best color if you heat the dye bath up, cover them and let them soak overnight.

You can check out my website for information on scouring cellulosic fibers, which is a must when dyeing with natural dyes. http://www.prairiefibers.com/Information.htm

NOTE: I don't ever use chrome or tin, I either live w/o those colors or I use other dye methods, that involve tons of work, to achieve the colors yeilded by using chrome and tin.

NOTE: When dyeing any fibers use only dedicated pots and utensils. Never re-use this equipment for food preparation.

A better pic of some of the flowers we made. My cherry tree is blooming on only one side and I'm not sure why.  

Garden Sheds

Here are some pics of my garden shed, and the Norway Mape, I think, in my driveway. The tree is trying to sprout leaves.

The side of the garage. The trim still needs to be painted, it was supposed to be burgandy, but hubby started painting the trim yellow instead. It looks good actually.  

Baby Maple Leaves 

My potting/garden shed wall. My garden shed is a nook that projects out from the main garage. 

Favorite room's and potting sheds

My favorite room in the house was my guest bedroom, that was until we started storing lots of extraneous junk there. That's changing this week though! Everything is going to be gone through, all of the bookwork and filing will be done, etc...

My potting shed is now my favorite project. It's way cute cute cute!. It's not really a potting shed but an extension on an old 1905 single car garage to fit a 1960/70's length car. It has since been walled off and I store my gardening things in there. There's no room to walk in there, so that's about all you can call it is storage!

Today hubby and I nailed a bunch of my old farm equipment rakes, and some old rusty iron rod, to the exterior wall of the shed. they look like flowers. I have a bunch of plow points to nail to the shed still. It's way cute, we also added a couple bucket style of planters I found, now to get the plants into the planter. And to get hubby to make me some bird houses, I've only been asking for them for about 3 plus years now.

I'll take pics tomorrow of the garden shed wall. It's also time to drag out all of those gardening magazines I"ve been collecting with the way cute/cool garden sheds in them, and implement those ideas. I think I may need a hummingbird feeder, or two, as well. And wind chimes, I have no wind chimes.

It'll be interesting to see what plants grow there this year, I've added Jerusalem Artichokes, sunflower seeds and various other perrinals to the area in front of the shed. I also have a sweet cherry tree growing in front of the shed. I may need some short plants come to think of it.

Flutes and such

Now that hubby is almost done with the wood studio for the evening I think I'll go out and select my wood for my flute. Instead of cedar I'm thinking of using the maple that is out there, since my hackberry was used as fire wood. Ever since I discovered that my cedar split to eternity and back I've been a bit lost. (It got left in hubbies truck for a week while we were out of state for my mothers funeral, it was way too hot in the truck). It's too bad because it's a gorgeous piece of cedar.

And I'm not sure why I have such a strong bent to make one or even play one, but it's an urge that will NOT go away, no matter how hard I try to ignore it. And I'm sure I'll have a dickens of a time getting hubby to do what I want, you try to take over a guys wood studio and see what happens. But then I won't let him anywhere near my sewing machines.

Old beads and such

Below are a couple of pics of some old beads I picked up in a thrift box at a thrift store. There were some old, or at least very well abused, large beads the diameter of a nickle in the box as well. And to think I was only interested in the antique ric rac and lace at the time.

Old beads, not sure what they are made of, ceramic maybe? They are very porous and the same color throughout.