Just Dyeing To Show You

 Hello there Internet People!  I actually left my house yesterday and ventured out into the world for a few hours.  Now I am broke, and I still don't have any more fabric to dye!  I do have some new tools and supplies that I was lusting after, but no fabric.  For the moment I have decided that I will take a break from dyeing once I finish up what I have, there are so many other things that I really need to get done this summer, and I won't do them if I can dye instead.  Like those flower beds full of salt grass that I still haven't cleaned out!  The section I did earlier this Spring is already filled back in, the only evidence that I was even there is the lack of dead leaves in that one section.  

Hey, guess what?!  I actually took some pictures!  They aren't all that great, but at least I tried, that's something, right?  So here are some shots of the fabrics I have dyed so far this year:

                                          
 If you look real close at the pictures you might notice that some of them appear to have a print to them.  I had a whole bunch of white on white printed fabrics that I over-dyed.  The fronts of the fabrics are kinda over powered by the white print, but the backsides are just gorgeous!  The print shows through just enough to add some texture to the design, but not enough to distract from it. 

I also took pictures of the embroidery floss that I dyed, I will need to take a few more (better) pictures before I can list them on Etsy, but other than that they are packaged and ready to go to new homes.  Well, excluding the ones I kept for myself that is.  

                               
These first two pictures are of the ones I am keeping.  The top one is all embroidery floss, the bottom one has different types of threads.  The one that I was worried about untangling was actually a size 10 Bamboo thread, they are the ones wrapped around the cone at the top of the second photo,  fortunately they were not as big of a pain as I thought they would be.  They were a pain, but not a monumental one.  I think my problems were more related to the fiber content than the size of the thread though. I think bamboo gets curly when you wash and dry it, at least to a much greater extent than cotton threads do.

The big hanks on the left side of the second photo are embroidery floss, the little pink one next to those is a size 8 pearl cotton (I think).  The blues and purple that come next are all a size 5 thread with a tiny bit of metallic wrapped in it.  They kinked like hell when the were washed!  Luckily I made small hanks of those so they were not too difficult to untangle. The green threads are all from a very old ball of crochet thread I had in the cupboard.  It was a very pale green and slightly discolored due to its age.  I have no idea what size they are, but I am thinking somewhere between a 5 and an 8.  Washing and dyeing the thread actually seems to have re-hydrated the thread as well, it is not nearly as brittle as it was before. 

The last threads in the picture are a size 3.  All of the threads, no matter what type, were wound around 18" long boards, tied off in four places to keep the threads from tangling, and then washed in very hot water, laundry detergent, and borax before dyeing.  I made a little washing machine out of an old plastic strainer and a large plastic bowl.  I have to do the agitating myself, but it is working very well for this process.  After they are washed, I rolled them in a towel to press the excess water out of them and then hung them up to dry.   After they were dry I soaked them in my bucket of soda ash water for a while and then squeezed all the extra water out.  The embroidery threads were dyed in sets of 5, so I took five skeins, and laid them out straight in a basin, and carefully started adding color to one end.  Depending on what I was doing I might have added a second color to the other end, or just added plain hot water, and squished the threads very carefully to get the dye worked through all of the fibers.  This gives each of the colors a 18" repeat on every skein, no mater how many colors are used.  Once the color was added, I squeezed out all of the extra dye and then dropped the threads into plastic zip-lock type baggies, and set them in the sun to cook.  After a few hours I took them out and rinsed each skein by hand in cold water, and then soaked them in cold water for a couple hours to remove as much of the excess dye as possible.  I then washed them again in my little washer, in extremely hot water, twice, rinsing with cold water in between each wash.  Again I rolled them in a towel to squeeze out the extra water.  Then I threw the towel, threads and all, into the dryer with a load of fabrics in a similar color.  Those colors are not going anywhere!

Greens & Browns Set #1

 

Pinks & Purples Set #2

Blues Set #3

Reds, Oranges, & Yellows Set #4

Hopefully I will get my ass outside soon and take some better pictures so I can get these listed on Etsy this year.  I think I will add in a CD disk of hand embroidery designs with the purchase of a set of threads, maybe that will help them sell a little faster than the t-shirts.  If they don't, then I guess I will just have to keep them for myself.  That would be a terrible pity indeed.  

Well, I think it is time for me to sign outta here again and get back to work.  I am making some good progress in getting my creative spaces more organized and user friendly and I would like to finish it up today so that I can get to work on some new projects that I am designing in my head.  All I need now is an extra 1,000 square feet and a couple dozen extra hours in the day and I will be all set.  But since that isn't going to happen, I better go make some better use of what I do have.  Until next time ...

Feeding My Obsessive Compulsive Creative Disorder

Hello there Internet People!  I thought I better check in here and do a little writing before I blow it off for another day.  Its funny, as much as I enjoy writing, and especially writing this Blog, I still have a hell of a time getting myself in here to write.  I don't know why.  Mostly I think it just a matter of never having enough time.  Writing takes a lot of time for me, each of these Blog posts usually take at least a couple of hours to write, even the short ones!  There are just never going to be enough hours in the day for me.  Especially since I spend so much time just sitting here thinking about stuff and not doing a damn thing.  I have gotten into a real rut of thinking lately, I need to climb out of my brain and get to doing!

I have been dyeing, of course.  And I have been learning stuff.  One of the things I learned this past week is that I don't want to dye threads smaller than a size 5 ever again!  I did a few hanks of a size 10 thread, oh my gawd they are a mess!  I think it is going to take hours to untangle the damn things!  And of course, since it was a smaller thread, I made longer hanks of it, I think they are like 25 yards a piece, almost 4 times the length of the embroidery thread hanks, which means all the more knots and tangles to undo.  It is a good thing I didn't intend to sell these, they would not be cost effective to produce when it take 6 hours just to deal with one hank of thread!

I still have not made it to taking pictures yet.  No surprise there I suppose.  That is another one of those things that I really enjoy, but you sure couldn't tell by the amount of pictures I take!  I will get there, eventually, but probably not today.

This might come as surprise to some of you, but I still haven't even taken the time yet to play with those Punchinella pieces yet!  The ones I was so excited about getting to play with, yeah those.  I ended up cutting stencils and templates the other day and never quite got around to anything else.  Fortunately they will still be there whenever I do get the time and the energy to play with them, its not like they can go bad if you don't use them soon enough.

Today I am untangling those threads, and rewinding the rest of the ones I have dyed.  I wound out another 85 new hanks of embroidery thread yesterday that is now ready to be washed and dyed.  I ended up with 220 skeins at around 9 yards each, plus 6 skeins at 25 yards each out of the cone that I bought.  Not bad for less than 30 bucks!  Unfortunately the cone is empty now, so now I get to fight with myself over whether I really need to buy another one.  And no, I do not NEED to, but unfortunately at some point I will convince myself that I do.  It is only a matter of time.  It is just one of the many drawbacks to having an obsessive compulsive creative disorder.  I am getting used to it.

Speaking of NEEDing things, the damn fabric store sent me another 50% off coupon yesterday.  Now I get to spend all week trying to convince myself that I do not NEED another bolt of fabric to dye!  (I do NEED it you know, desperately.)  I am almost done with everything I had to dye this year.  Another day or two of dyeing and I won't have anything else left to play with for the rest of the summer!  I think I actually NEED at least 2 more bolts.  Damnit. 

Well, I better sign outta here and shut down this computer before I go shopping again.  The laundry is not folding itself and the housework fairy hasn't been to my house in weeks, so I might have enough to distract myself from spending any money today.  Maybe.  Wish me luck.

Until next time ...

To Dye Without Dying, That Is The General Goal

Hello there Internet People!  I was planning on skipping the Blogging again and going right to work on dyeing today, but Mother Nature had other plans for me apparently.  There is a massive thunderstorm going on outside right now, so going outside to dye is probably not a good idea.  This is one instance when dyeing could lead to dying!  Not a good idea.  So here I am ready to ramble away at all of you, my loss is your gain, I guess.

I did get to spend most of the day yesterday outside.  I am washing out the last of the fabrics and the skeins of embroidery floss now.  I tried some new experiments with the whole dyeing process yesterday, some were very successful, some not so much, but I learned some things and I had a lot of fun! This was my first try at dyeing threads, and I think they may turn out very nice, fingers crossed.  They look great right now, but they aren't done washing yet, so that could potentially change.

I have lots more fabric and about 150 more skeins of different threads to dye, now I just need Mother Nature and the rest of the world to cooperate so that I can get out there and dye them!  At the moment the weather forecast looks promising for tomorrow, but then they didn't mention this thunderstorm when I checked the forecast yesterday, so I don't have a lot of faith in the weather forecasters.  

I am still trying to decide on my plan B for today.  I pulled out all the art quilts that I have started but never finished and have been looking at them to see what I can do to get them completed.  I have one of a dragon that is almost done, it just needs a little extra embellishing, and a binding, so maybe I will work on that today.  It would probably be a good thing to have at least one finished Art Quilt if I am going to call myself an Art Quilter.  I know it has never stopped me before, but, still, it would be nice. 

Well, in the two hours since I started typing this post I did manage to get the threads all washed out.  They are now hanging up to dry and they are still lovely!  I am really impressed with the results, it almost makes the massive pain in the ass of setting it all up worthwhile.  Here, see for yourselves :

The second picture has a yellow cast to it, (and it is sideways) the towel is actually sort of white as shown in the first picture and the greens are much more vibrant.  Some day I will learn to take a decent picture, but until then, this is what we are stuck with.

Well, if I am ever going to get anything done today I need to sign out of here and get to it.  Until next time ...