which one???

This caramel colored fabric is the same piece of fabric that is a couple of posts down. It is cutch dyed and then compost dyed smooth silk dupioni fabric. The center piece fabric is compost dyed, screen printed, and rust dyed silk chiffon.

This photo the background fabric is crinkled silk haboti that was bound resist dyed first with indigo and then overdyed with osage orange. I only have one of the center piece fabric, maybe neither piece fabric is right for the center?
Vote by placing a comment - this is what happens when one gets stuck in the studio whilest auditioning fabrics!

Wool Rant 2008

Dirty side of the Jacob fleece, filled with cockle burrs, grass, or hay, from improper feeding and pasture care. I intentionally left the picture files large so you could click on them and see the detail areas of the fleece.

The cut or clean side of the same fleece, see the potential!

Dingle berry, or turd, either way it should have been removed BEFORE the fleece was put into the bag.

Cockle burrs, gazillions of them, and this pasture was reportedly clean of burrs, a little bit of round up would be a blessing in this pasture! Or a teenager with a weed hook, whichever the farmer wishes to do, but burrs seriously decrease the value of ANY wool fleece. I'll spend hours picking the burrs out of this fleece to get it ready for market.

Hay was fed to the sheep in big round bales, well sheep like to rub against objects to scratch an itch and this is the end result, lots of vegetable matter (VM) in the fleece, again many hours of cleaning this to make it ready for market.

More hay embedded in the wool.

Black and white Jacob fleece that needs some TLC, it's full of burrs, needs to be skirted, and then washed before it can be put up for sale. Below: Lilac Jacob Fleece, the fleece is very soft, but a mess none the less. I can't wait to see the final product.

A picture speaks a thousand words right, then these are speaking mega bytes of words!!!
I think it should go without saying that if you are really wanting top dollar for the wool you are growing then you need to keep your pastures clean of burrs, and other vegetable matter.

Hand work


My shoulder has been bothering me, too much lawn care, so instead of wrestling large pieces in the sewing machine I've been doing a bit of hand work.

I started this piece tonight by needle felting various fibers using the Janome Expression, and now I've plans to do a bunch of stitching to the surface. This pic is the inspiration a red velvet spider mite on some moss. I took this photo last Sunday when we were out looking for morels in the woods.

Etsy Treasury

Liz Plummer created an Etsy.com Treasury and included me how incredibly generous is that??? Here is the link:

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=40412

I've more work to add to my store tonight, I spent part of today out in the garden removing creeping charlie, a type of ground ivy that is quite persistant. It's supposed to rain for the next several days.

I couldn't wait!

Front of the quilt, I did some lose bound resist so you can still see the pink from the madder lac bath behind the blue. Typically if you over dye with indigo you WILL strip the base colors some if not completely.
I couldn't wait until tomorrow to over dye this piece so I dipped it six times in an indigo vat tonight, say 11:45 pm! And lets just say this is a major improvement over the previous color. Currently it's air drying over my shower curtain rod in the bathroom, silk side down on the rusty part of the rod!!!

In Progress

Well this is the before shot from about two years ago, everyone said it needed color, and they were right - to some extent. I do love the white on white work in this piece, I think a lot of folks just don't get subtlies of abstract art, I know my husband certainly doesn't.

Shot of the front the darker pink is Tsukineko ink that was mixed with aloe vera and applied with a dauber. It was never heat set so imagine my suprise when it came through the bath, and two trips through the washer and dryer, intact!

Detail of th wool batting notice it's pink coloring.

And it's taken a couple of years to get through this one! I"m thinking of compost and rust dyeing this piece next. Silk dupioni front, cotton fabric backing, and wool batting, it has been sitting in a Madder lac dye bath for about a week, no premordanting. I think the bath may have exhausted after the first rounds of silk fabrics that went through.

Fairie Names

I was visiting Au Fil du Jardin's blog and found a link that will tell you what your Fairy Name is and I found that my fairy name is:

Your fairy is called Hex Icefilter
She is a bone chilling bringer of justice for the vulnerable.
She lives in places hexed and tainted by black magic.
She is only seen on midsummer's eve.
She wears black feathers and rose petals. She has icy blue butterfly wings.
Hmm a person could produce some very interesting artwork based on this description alone!