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Except for the really hot weather here in Rochester, it was a great birthday week with my daughter and granddaughter visiting from Seattle and my older daughter visiting from Charlotte! Here we visited Charlotte beach and Suzanne and Amelia road the carousel -- note that Amelia is on a kitty as she is pretty much half kitty.
Here they are playing on the bouncey "pillow" at Wickham farms. They both had a great time on this. There is a small miniature golf course there and Amelia had never played this before. Before the day was over, she insisted on playing it three times! Aunt Lisa had the patience to teach her how to play and to go through the 54 holes with her!! Her mom related that she never could play mini golf!
Couldn't resist a picture of my youngest with one of the t-shirts that I had recently ice-dyed. It was a medium I had done for someone else who didn't like the predominance of the yellow but I knew it wouldn't be wasted! I have two more mediums to do for other requestors. I have consigned a number of these ice-dyed t-shirts to friend at the Hungerford Bldg. in Rochester. The first one sold before even having a price put on it!! I am going to try a slightly different design this week but will keep with the yellow through purple colors for now although may do a couple of black and brown ones for me to see how I like that.
Grandpa brought up a big bag of stuffed animals from the basement and Amelia insisted upon sleeping with all of them!
Suzanne is sitting with George who had to find a new sleeping spot when all his usual ones were taken by people!!
A couple of days before they came, I saw the Pileated Woodpecker for the first time this year. He nicely was visible right out my back door!
Warren didn't cultivate our garden quite as rigorously as usual this year and we had a volunteer spider plant appear where we used to grow them. It has probably been ten years since we grew them in the yard so were very very surprised!
Been back to more ice dyeing! Really like how this last batch came out. Think I have finally gotten the right amount of dye sprinkled on the ice. I also put most of the dyes into old spice and parmesan cheese shaker containers so it is more controlled. I put the sun yellow on first this time and like how they turned out. This last bunch were in smaller sizes and will be for sale at my art quilt group meeting (I just posted a picture on FB the other day and several people wanted to buy them even though I didn't really have them for sale!!).
This was the smallest size of the group - a medium as someone requested a smaller size. If she doesn't want it, I already have another person who wants it!! I have found that almost everyone likes the blue/green/yellow combination -- very Monet waterlilies!!
The remaining two t-shirts.
One of these t-shirts (and I can't identify which one even) started its life as a lime green t-shirt!! I had bought it in the wrong size so figured it would overdye nicely (and it obviously did!!).
These are several of the eight mandalas I did yesterday. I have discovered that the one closest to the ice (the top one) is the one that I had originally thought was the bottom one -- ie, the darker, more solid one is the one sitting on the "drop" cloth so the ice melting must be pushing the color down. I couldn't identify the partners in this bunch like I could in the last batch. Part of the reason is that this was literally a random bunch of fabrics that I found. I knew they were cotton but had no idea if they were pfd and mercerized, pfd only or non-pfd. They were random sizes as well and I didn't iron them before folding. I used some muslin that I found as the drop cloths. Wish I had more of that as it dyed beautifully but I have no idea what it was or where I got it.
This is one of the pieces that was on top. I had these random pieces of sateen -- didn't know whether they were the good or the non-pfd stuff I had. Guess they were the good one. All those lighter areas are where the ice melted obviously and pushed the color down. (The dyes go into the fabric before the ice is completely melted -- the kind of slide down as the ice is melting as you can see from my previous pictures.)
The colors I used were Sun Yellow, Grass Green, Leaf Green, Basic Blue and Intense Blue.
I have only washed one of the "drop cloths". This is about a yard long. I really like it and look forward to seeing how the other three turned out!!
You can see that I again stacked the mandalas as I really like the subtle differences and as I used less dye and some lighter values, they came out pretty good! I am sure now that the one on the left is the one on top and the one on the right is on the bottom. It was easy to sort them out last night as they were all so different. Note that these haven't been ironed yet!
The post today will be a relatively detailed description of how I do these. This is one of the tshirts lying across a relatively flat surface before I start "pleating".
Here I have almost finished the pleating process. I start at the lower left hand corner and just use my fingers to.gather up the garment on the diagonal. One is reversed as I did it inside out!!
All gathered up and now I spiral it.
Two spiraled t-shirts sitting on the drop cloth which is on grate suspended over a plastic box. I did four t-shirts altogether yesterday.
Here you can see four mandalas altogether. There are two in each half of this square (really looks more like a rectangle as I didn't cut as even as I could have!).
This is what the t-shirts look like after I have applied the ice and the dyes. Used here were sun yellow, grass green, leaf green and some dark green (which is very very dark I have discovered).
This is one set of mandalas covered with the ice and dye. Lots of yellow here.
This is mandalas after 2 1/2 hours.
These are the t-shirts after 2 1/2 hours.
These are the mandalas after five hours.
T-shirts at five hours. The ice is almost all melted. Note that a lot of the yellow is still in powdery form.
These are the mandalas right before I start washing -- this was about 7 hours later. I do these in my basement which is relatively cool.
These are the t-shirts before washing.
Before I do the washing, I nuke each of the t-shirts for about four minutes and do the same for the mandalas (although I group the mandalas and do 4 at a time). I do the same with the drop cloths. Just want to get them nice and warm to make sure the dye is set.
I then unfold and rinse in cold water getting a lot of the dye out and hopefully most of the soda ash. I then dunk them in quite warm water, swishing them around to get out as much dye as possible. (The water will look very dark.) I change up the two waters after two t-shirts. I then thrown them all into a bucket and cart them to the washing machine for final washing. I use the hottest water I can in my washer and add Synthrapol. I also make sure I am using the maximum load size. The rinse water is warm. After this wash, I remove them and get all the strings that have tied them all up off and look at them as this is probably what they will look like. I then repeat the wash/rinse process one more time. I always tell people to make sure they wash before using as well as they may have a hotter wash cycle and potentially could get some more dye out. The dye that is left is really a stain and no longer active though so generally if there is some staining, a little Synthrapol will get it right out.
These are the remaining mandalas displayed with their "partners".
And here are the t-shirts. The first two are Hanes x-large and the third one is a Basic Editions (K-Mart) 2x.
This is a 1x v-neck t-shirt.
It was a day to do some experimenting but not on t-shirts as that would be a little costly. I tried putting clothespins on a couple of pieces and then I stacked two sets of pieces to see if they would come out with the same pattern (they should). I also used mostly purples with some blues. To say the least, I was very surprised by the outcome!!
The most surprising was that by looking at the pieces separately, I could not tell which ones were the stacked ones!! I finally figured it out when I put them ll on the computer and had them all small and sitting next to each other!!
This was the mate to the one above! I suspect it was the one on the bottom as it has less color but will have to confirm this by actually labeling the pieces next time!! Here I thought I had a great opportunity to have two the same!! Hardly....
Here you can see the two pieces next to each other. I like both of them but notice with this bunch of pieces (I did 10 altogether in one session) that I like the photos better than the actual pieces although I do like these two. Overall, I think I used far too much dye yesterday and will get out my shaker bottles to tone this down a bit.
The next two are also stacked pieces. They look more alike than the first two but not if you are just looking at the big pieces.
I am not sure if the color difference is true or a function of darkening up the pieces as the flash lightened them up too much. They are really pretty dark.
Here they are next to each other.
The next two pieces were really dark and I used all the different purples that I had including Grape, Blue-Violet and I think one called Deep Purple. I may have thrown in a little blue in as well. These were my least favorites as they were very dark.
This one and the previous piece were the ones with the clothespins. I think the effect was extremely subtle (so subtle I m not even sure these were the two pieces!). I only put two clothespins along the edges of these two pieces. You can see a lighter spot along the diagonals.
You'll notice on a few of the pieces that they are longer than they are wider. Operator error I think!
I believe that these were done together as well although I didn't mark anything so it is just a guess on my part. By together here, I mean that they sat next to each other with the same colors sprinkled on top.
These two were done together as well with a lot more blue in them -- I believe a lot of Basic Blue. The bottom one is my least favorite.
Overall, the day was a limited success. I got a few pieces I liked and a few I didn't like too much. Going to go back to using those greens which are mixed dyes as I like what I got with them better. Will do some more mandalas today and then back to t-shirts. I had to order more Synthrapol as I have been using Dawn which seems to do the job just fine but...
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