Natural Fiber Dyes

Dyeing fiber from nature can be full of surprises.  I learned this while attending a natural dye workshop on Saturday taught by Dagmar Kloss.  We used mostly plants but also flowers and insects.  The repertoire included weld, osage, madder, fustic, logwood, cochineal and marigold.  Yellows come mostly from woods and leaves, reds from roots and insects, and blues from fermented leaves.   

After doing a value study with 3 different simmers in the dye we overdyed half of the skeins with indigo.  We got some really gorgeous greens and near browns.  What was interesting about using the indigo is that there should be a minimal amount of air in the dye pot for it to work.   You can tell that it’s ripe for dying if it looks green.  When you pull the skein from the dye pot it comes out green and when the air hits it, it turns blue.

We worked in teams and my team was privileged to work with the cochineal.  This is not something for folks squeamish about insects.  We ground the dried insects in a blender to a powder.  They appeared grey going in but the powder was a beautiful red.  Our fiber turned a bit purple, which Dagmar suggested came from having some iron in the water.  It could have come from the pot we made the extract in or from the water that the fiber was mordanted in. 

Now that I’m completely inspired to work with natural dyes I’ve begun collecting daylilies from my garden.  No loss for the garden, I collect in the evening after the flowers have had their show and will be wilting overnight getting ready for the next day’s bloom.

Fair Trade

These days when I hear “Fair Trade” I usually think of coffee.  Fair trade, which is intended to support decent wages and higher social standards, includes many other goods including handcrafts, cocoa, chocolate, tea and other items. 

When I was young a fair trade meant that my brother gave me what I considered to be the right amount of marbles for a handful of Jujubes.  With that definition in mind, this is my fair trade.  Every week a friend drives to my workplace, drops off the Sunday paper and picks up the coupon packets from my paper.  She is heavily into couponing and needs 4 sets of coupons for the best discounts.  I’m thrilled because I don’t have to concern myself with running out of newspaper for my bunnies’ litter boxes.  I ran out once and had to use wood shavings – it was awful.  As a bonus, the newspaper comes in plastic that’s used to protect it in the rain, which these days seems to be every day.  Sometimes the plastic from Sunday's paper is printed with advertisements and I’ve been waiting to have enough to spin some into yarn.  Here’s a pic of the yarn that I spun from the printed plastic.  What I learned while spinning was to avoid doing it on a hot, muggy day.  I had a dickens of a time getting the plastic to feed through the spinning wheel’s orifice and most of the time had to wind it on the bobbin manually.

 To see more of my plastic yarn and some of the items I made from it, here's a link to the yarn section of my Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Kruser?section_id=5414269

Another Face Vase

When a friend saw my face vases he mentioned that it reminded him of the pottery face jugs currently made out in North Carolina.  Dating back to the 1700's they were originally used as grave markers to scare the evil spirits and then later they began to be used to store moonshine.  The ugly faces were supposed to scare children away so they wouldn't get into the moonshine.  In browsing I saw that some of them had reptiles on them.  I did some doodling and decided I'd either try a Chameleon or a snake.  Then I ran across this newspaper article and chameleon was.

Here's a photo of the face with his eyes trying to see what's crawling on his head and one from the back showing the chameleon.

For more information about this item please go to my Etsy site here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/50380360/chameleon-face-vase-in-wool-felt

"lives of quiet desperation" (Henry David Thoreau)

I don't know that it's possible to get around it, in one way or another as consumers we are forced to support overseas manufacturing and the exploitation of workers who can barely put food on the table for a day's work.  It hit me again this weekend when I was fabric shopping to finish my current project.  I looked at the really gaudy craft items hanging on the wall.  This is the stuff that ends up at garage sales or resale shops or landfills after a very short time of "service."  These are also the things that are made overseas for pennies.  It bothered me to think about it.  It bothers me now.  Now I buy wool from Illinois farmers because I want to support them.  The extra cost is worth knowing that I'm supporting real wages.

My current project ... My last post was about a bunny and my experiment in collage.  Bunnies are so delightful as subjects!  Over a year ago I fostered a family of bunnies, a mom and 3 sons.  Mom and one son were adopted together and I became friends with their new mom.  Her birthday is today and this is a small art quilt that I'm working on of her two treasures.

Little G

G is a rabbit that I bunny-sit for on weekends when her parents go out of town.  She's been nicknamed G because even though she's a Checkered Giant she's small for her size - so just G.  I was inspired to make a simple quilt of her because of her bold contrasting colors.  She has the cutest face with those big black splotches!  I also wanted to branch out a bit and work with some different materials.  For the background I glued paper napkins and newspaper strips to white cotton.  I painted the base with fabric paint and after letting it dry I did some sewing.  I put down a layer of tulle and couched the yarn down following the newspaper strips.  Then I took out my heat gun and melted the tulle.  All the time while I was working I expected it to be a lesson in failure because it wasn't until the last step that I liked what I saw.  Here's my finished piece:

Face Sculpture in Wool

For a few months now I've been giving thought to sculpture. I shopped with a friend to get her back into wood carving and my interest was peaked even more. Then one day driving home from an art fair I had a thought. Now this usually ends up badly, I miss turns, I get lost, all I really see is the vision of my new creation in front of me. This time it was a woolen vessel "sculpted" with a facial expression. Since I had made a few sculpted vases already, how different could this be? Why not add an eyebrow and a nose? What a delight this came to be! With felting you never can be too sure of the outcome so this could turn into quite an adventure.

See more detail here:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/48642694/face-pottery  This item sold on June 28, 2010