Snow Dyeing Day

Having spent four days this week walking to and fro between home and the office over snow and ice, I was feeling throughly fed up, so I decided to take Friday off and have a craft day. Since I have some Procion MX Dyes, and there's snow everywhere, I thought I'd try snow dyeing.

I had a dyers pack of fabrics and lace from the WM Embroiderers' Guild regional day last summer, so I chose some fabrics and soaked them in soda ash.



Next I mixed my dyes, and scrunched the fabrics in bargain £1 from Poundland cat litter trays.



I piled them with heaps of clean snow and then drizzled my dyes on top; one blue-black tray, one blue-red tray, and one red-yellow tray.



Now I just need to let them sit, batch them somewhere warm overnight, then rinse them. As a side effect, I now have pretty hands and apron!



This afternoon I'm planning to make some felt, in lovely purple shades.

Emulsion Transfers

After last weekend's image transfer workshop, I wanted to use the techniques I'd learned, so I found some nice copyright free images, and went to Osbornes to have them copied. I've applied them to fabric, and they're drying upstairs.

Felt and velvet

This is my latest experiment in embroidery - handmade wool felt with silk, on a background of black velvet and painted bondaweb, with seed stitch used to couch silk throwsters waste, and a bit of beading. Lots more to do on it, but I'm very happy with it so far.

More webs and wheels

I've been working on my webs and wheels hoopla on and off for a couple of weeks, and I'm really happy with how it's turning out. I've experimented with quite a few variations, including size, spoke numbers,, thread type, and especially satisfyingly, working both webs and wheels with two strands simultaneously. The two colour wheels are lovely, and the webs look like flowers - I want to work one in reds to look like a rose.

I'm now stitching simple meandering lines of chain stitch over, under and around the wheels, to ground them a bit, and hopefully add to the organic feeling that I'm getting from the embroidery.

Guild are planning to pick a different stitch every month, and I think I'll work my pieces up as hooplas, so that I can display them in my house, and still have samplers to refer to for future work.

Webs and wheels

I started this little piece in our members session about web and wheel stitches yesterday, and I'm pleased with how it's going so far. I plan to shade it through brown into green, filling the hoop with big chunky wheels, scattering delicate ones in between them, and then snaking chain and wheatear stitches through the gaps.