This weekend in sewing....

You'll be shocked to see I made three more postcards.
These all show off fabric I painted during a thickened dyes workshop. I can't wait to send these out.  This gets me to 20 of my goal of 34 before my 34th birthday.  I want to spend time tomorrow to do a more involved collage one, they can't all just be 1 piece of fabric.  But these fabrics are some of my favorite, so I love showing them off.

In the mail this week I got the postcards I ordered from Moo.com  They are seriously awesome and I can't wait to send them out, though postcrossing has been a bit of a disapointment so far. I know it takes a long time for cards to reach international destinations, but the one I sent to someone in the US hasn't been registered. But every card I sent to someone on ravelry the same day has been recieved!  However, I joined a postcard swap group on ravelry; so maybe that will be more reliable.

I also started a Craftsy class called "Sewing with Fleece".  I mainly wanted a little more step by step to make a fleece jacket (though I bet I could have figured it out...) While waiting to arrive, I did the first project- a hat.  The hat is comfy and warm, and I like the way my hair curls, but I think it highlights that I have a big head....  Still, I've had this ice skate fleece forever, so it was exciting to use it.  So what do you think? Can I wear it in public?

Also, the winner of the postcard drawing was Shecki.  I will contact you and get it mailed to you if you would like it.

Eagle Quilt

I took a class last weekend on surface design- using thickened dyes to paint on fabric. (Confusing to call it painting- because it is definitely dyeing, not painting...)

Anyhow- I "invented" (someone has probably done it before me) a technique to make a variegated

line. I took a squeeze bottle and stacked yellow and red, so it would squeeze out yellow, red, and shades of orange.  Then I drew a stippled  line all over a piece of fabric.

When I got home I had this idea to stipple all the white space. Following the curve of the line I stippled about 75% of the quilt, all but inside one big blog near the bottom. I thought it would look cool to pebble that- if you look closely you can see the change of texture.

This was my idea for a finished project, but it didn't look like anything.

So I thought I should overdye it.  I overdyed in a light orange dye bath.  Now you can see the white quilting lines better, but it still didn't look like anything.

I had the idea to make it into a sunset. I went through Kevin's animal photographs (I wanted a giraffe, but couldn't find just the right one) and found a gorgeous eagle sitting on branches, and went to work in photoshop tracing it as a silhoutte.

I used freezer paper to cut it out of fabric backed with fusible, and fused my eagle onto the quilt. It is just fused, not stitched, so super easy raw edge applique. My freezer paper didn't want to stay attached, so cutting the fine detail was a bit tough.

It still needs binding, but I am so happy that my sunset silhouette turned out nicely!

Adventures in dyeing!

So a little while ago I got a procion MX dyeing starter kit.  I asked my parents for larger bottles of the 3 primary colors for Christmas and they got them for me (plus 10 yards of white fabric!!)  The starter kit also had black in it.

I thought the starter bottles were 1 ounce, so I asked for 8 ounces- it turns out they are like a half ounce, and 8 ounces is A LOT, so I should have dye for quite some time.  I think it has a shelf life of a year or two (but have read of it lasting up to 10!) so I'm going to need to go on a dyeing spree.

Christmas I had a good start at it, I wanted to do gradations and saw a tutorial of how to dilute the same amount of dye more and more in successive dye baths to get a gradation.  Sadly, it didn't work for me.  (Well, it kind of did on the blue, you can see it is lighter on the last one.)  But I did get pretty fabric.  There were 4 of each color, but I already broke into some of it for a fused quilt...so one yellow is missing.

So after doing that, I did some snow dyeing.  Snow dyeing is when you put the fabric in a container, pile snow on top of it and then put the dyes on it like a snow cone.  The melting is what determines the patterns in the ice.  In the above picture you can see the first two I did, with Radiance fabric (half silk).  I actually like the patterns on cotton better.  I love the orange (made with fuschia and yellow), which is good because I accidentally put in two fat quarters instead of one.

I also took a craftsy class and tried a few of the folded manipulations.  The black is just accordion pleated and folded in half.  The purple is folded like a flag and then a resist is created using jar lids.  I asked Kevin to take pictures, and really appreciate that he did (his camera is confusing, I can't use it much) but I don't think he did the best job of showing off the fabrics. (The green is snow dyed.)

For my gradation, I didn't plan to use a resist, but it came out like one on the Pimatex, the technique I used was putting them in large solo cups, but one of the resist techniques was scrunching in small cups, so I guess I didn't have enough room.  I also thought this little pattern was quite funny:

And like many dyers before me, I was looking for something else to dye.  I hate the white underwear that comes in packs of cute underwear (why do they always throw in white? I don't want white!) so I dyed all of them too!  They went into the snow baths with the fat quarters.  Now I love my adorable undies.  And we spiral tie-dyed a shirt.  Again, sorry you can't see the pattern, it looks awesome!

Also, none of these fabrics are PFD.  I prewashed regular fabric- this is all from Fabric.com and it all dyed beautifully.  I had written what was what, but other than the pink being Pimatex, I can't remember.  So my lesson learned: buy what is on sale, prewash.  I tried the Timeless Treasures Broadcloth, the Cotton Broadcloth ($2.98/yd!), the Cotton Supreme Solids, the Premium Broadcloth (kind of thick), and the Moda Bella Broadcloth.  Everything looked great.   I also dyed some Kona I had on hand.

Dye pot

When Suzy came over we did some dyeing with Wilton's icing dyes. Mine are old, so they didn't blend as well as they should (I suggested we use mine, knowing that if she didn't open hers yet they wouldn't dry out as quickly- since we wanted to use a sampler of all the colors.)

Gunky, or not, they still produced beautiful colors! Kevin just got a new dutch oven, so I arranged my nest of new yarns in it. I liked the way the small teal ball turned out so much I dyed one of my new skeins of Sheila's gold with the teal too!

Mini Yarn Skeins!

What's in the picture? Teeny tiny skeins of yarn. Aren't they cute?

And why are there so many of them?

Well I've taken on a new "lifetime achievement project" now that Daffodil Design is done. I'm going to work on a sock yarn blanket made up of mitred squares approxmately 2 inches each. These mini skeins are for a swap- where other people will send me their sock yarn, so that I won't have so many repeats in the blanket. It will take almost 1,000 squares I think to make this blanket a blanket size, so I can't do that on my own.

The assorted skeins are just 2.5 grams- teeny tiny, but a square only takes around 2 grams. The larger skeins are 5 grams, they can be used by people making bigger squares, or make 2 squares. They are part of a dye your own swap. I cannot wait to see what I get back! I love hand dyed yarn.

Do you have leftover sock yarn you'd like to get rid of? I'll be happy to take it off your hands! I'm going to need all I can get, and I'd be glad to send you some assorted skeins back as a trade if you are doing the same project.

This is all because my sock drawer is filled, so I need a break from socks for awhile. I'm also thinking about starting Kevin a DNA scarf (again... the last one did not work) and taking a "Knit One Below" class at the yarn store. The classes are all done in 3 sessions, and I don't need that long to learn a technique (just show it to me in 10 minutes) but it's not too expensive, and it will be nice to socialize with other knitters.

Remember the rainbow realization

Yes, I realize I'm an idiot. I know how primary colors make secondary colors and so forth, but I never connected it to the order of the rainbow before. So anyhow, I just got new yarn in (from www.wool2dye4.com) and decided to make some rainbow yarn to celebrate.

I used red, blue, and yellow, and put large patches of it, then smooshed it together so they would blend in the middle. And this is what I got.
There is one section that isn't in the right order. I was so focused on getting the right number of color repeats, I messed up the order. DOH And one more, a close up!

And now, I'm off for a sushi dinner and a DVD night- I think we are going to get a season of Tiny Toons :) (This is what passes as date night. I wanted to go see Julie and Julia, but do you know how expensive movies are? CRAZY)

The other news for the day- Kevin now owns a kayak. He spent a full paycheck, but he got a free t-shirt! (I'm secretly jealous I don't have one...)

Progress...

I thought I should show a picture of Daffodil Design before it gets larger than the gap in the needles (these are 24" circs, I'm hoping I can use them for most of the project, but by the end it will be a very very tight squeeze, so I will probably have to buy another set of needles. That will cost a ton of money, because you know I'm gonna end up getting other stuff too...)

Anyhow this is Daffodil Design. I've made a huge step forward in my knitting with this. Each round has the same pattern repeated 6 times, but I wouldn't call it a simple pattern (you know k3, yo, k3, yo sort of thing)- however- I have found that once I do one repeat I am able to do the other 5 without refering to the pattern. I was actually doing well not refering to the pattern with the next repeat, but then it turned out the motif changed and I had to unknit quite a bit, so I am no longer trying to be psychic. However, the ability to memorize a complicated pattern has eluded me until now, and I am very proud of myself.





This is the "yarn" I am using for the project. It is crochet cotton, so I think it might actually be considered thread.






This is yarn I dyed for Marlene socks. I am really excited to knit Marlene, and now I have sport weight yarn so they should go over my heel! This yarn is a semi-solid blue, the first yarn I've done using Jacquard dyes instead of food dye like Wiltons and Kool-Aid. I'm not sure I love it. It took a few trys to get all the white spots out, and the subtle color differences I put in don't seem to show. However, I never know until I knit it up...

I had previously shown you Marlene in the yarn that I am now using for the Mockery socks, which by the way were not ripped out after all. They are my work socks, which means they get 30 minutes of kniting at lunch. They are ready for heel #1 and I am trying to decide between short row and heel flap, guess it will be whichever the wind guides me to tomorrow at lunch, likely a short row, as those take way less time. I am completly loving them, the subtle pattern, the shine of the silk in the yarn, the GORGEOUS accidental color. It's perhaps the best yarn I've ever dyed, and I'm happy about the pattern I chose. Sorry, no pictures of those yet.

Yarn take two.

This is the same yarn I posted the last time. To get rid of the white spots (which I hid in that photo) I dumped it into a bath of red kool aid. So now the yarn isn't pink, but reddish-pink. I'm very happy with it. You can still see some very light spots, but after carefully looking at them, I think it's safe to say they are LIGHT pink.

I reskeined this last night, which means that I took the skein I dyed and made it into a new skein that is a different size. That way the "chunks" of color don't group together, and instead the colors interact with each other. The photo isn't very true to color, it's a very light red, not orangey, but the interaction of the colors is pretty realistic.

I think I reached my goal of doing a semi-solid pretty well.

I'm finished with the gusset decreases of my Sunshine sock. Back to work now... but hopefully a more reasonable day, not 14 hours.

Kettle Dying

I tried to do a semi-solid dye method yesterday. It didn't work the way I wanted. The first pot I didn't get ANY color on the underside at all- just the surface that I could immediatly see. Urgh.

I so I made up another pot and got about 75% coverage. Why are there so many white spots?

So I made up a third pot for immersion- this time there was no kettle dye method at all, I wanted full coverage. Grr- STILL white spots.

So now I'm trying to decide if I should keep it as is and just see how it knits up. I think it's going to be strings of 7-8 stitches though, so probably not that nicely. Maybe I should dunk it in some Kool-Aide to over dye it. Kool-Aid seems to have better coverage than the Wilton's dyes I've used.

I do really like the pink though. Pink is fun, and pink socks are very fun.

Finished the first brown sock... have done the ribing for the next one.