Thursday, June 25, 2009

This is Just Too Much Fun!

Just in case you think that the only thing I do is to marble fabric, there have been other accomplishments during the past couple of weeks!! I managed to finish the Orange Jacket and to make a cute outfit for my new granddaughter. I already sent out the matching hat to the little dress so that Amelia would not get a sunburn! My daughter and son in law have not gotten pictures uploaded for awhile now, so I will patiently wait.

This is the front of the jacket. The bands down the middle are composed of very small hexagons with radial symetry. There is also a band of these on each sleeve. On the bottom right (your right, not the jacket's), there is a big chunk of marbled fabric which worked perfectly. The oranges and the long medium green stripes are also marbled fabric. All the "solids" are my hand dyeds so it is almost completely made up of my fabric!

The back of the jacket has a little "quilt" in the middle again made up of hexagons with radial symetry.

However, this marbling on my old uglies has really been even more fun as all I am "wasting" is the paints (and they are expensive) and not the fabric as I had already given up hope on that!! Today I have been playing with an expansion of the stripes and adding a little pattern with some controlled dropping of colors. My favorite was my last one. The piece of fabric was a failed experiment in an Elin Noble class (using two different kinds of dyes). I had stamped with a rectangular stamp all over the piece and there were these reddish rectangles and a turquoise background. I decided to put stripes on top of it (figuring it would be really hideous) as I like to REALLY take chances with the last piece of a session! I am really quite pleased with it! Who would have thought!

There is an outside chance that dear husband will be gone again for two weeks. I have decided that if he does, I will devote those two weeks to extensive salt dyeing if the weather cooperates! As I am not going to QBL this year, I need to have a creative break of some kind. Today would be perfect as it is supposed to be 90 and the humidity is relatively high.


These two are the snakes. They are on a nondescript purplish fabric.





The one on the left was done on a very bright kelly green. Used some dulled greens to tone it down. The next one is another of the stripes.




This was my very favorite and is the one that is done on the rectangles. You can just vaguely see those rectangles. You can always double click to see a bigger image!

5 comments:

Nina Marie said...

Ohhhhhh Beth these are gorgeous. That's the kind of thing that momma's save as family keepsakes. Plus people will be sure to know where your passion lies!

Pat Pauly said...

All I can say is wow! Get those into some wonderful quilt. Love the worms.

Patricia said...

I am a new dyer and reader of your blog. First I want to say I really appreciate you sharing your expertise with us(me). I have a question--when you speak of 5% of a color or 2% etc. what do you mean. At this point I am not dyeing by weight, as a result, my measurements are 1 T., 1 Tsp. etc. Is there a way to convert the % to measurements? Thanks in advance. If you have a chance, visit me at patricia-myquiltingadvneture.blogspot.com. I post the results of my "dyeing adventures".

Hugs!

Beth Brandkamp said...

If you have Color by Accident, that is a good start as Ann doesn't like doing 5% etc. (She and I agree to disagree on this one thing.) I highly recommend taking a class with Carol Soderlund if you ever get a chance if you really want to learn how to control better but usually you really want to do this after you have gotten pretty good. Roughly (as all dyes weight differently), 1 tsp/cup of water is equivalent to about 5%. Ann generally is using a 12-15% solution which gives nice dark colors. I also highly recommend Ann Johnston and Elin Nobel as teachers. I have found that Egyptian Cotton at Joanns takes dye beautifully. I will put your blog up on my blog and appreciate that you have done that with mine!

Patricia said...

Thanks so much! I do have Color By Accident and I have tried a couple of her "recipes". I also got a lot of information from the Dyeing 101 blog (which doesn't appear to be active anymore). It is nice and hot here in TN today so I am going out to try a gradient of one color dyeing experiment. Thanks again for your help! I also love your jacket. I made a vest that reminds me of it (I took a class with Rachel Clark).

Have a great day!