Ugly fabric?

How do you describe ugly fabric? for me it’s one that is just not my cup of tea, and needs a bit of sweetening to make it easier to look at.  What about you, do you have a piece or several pieces that no longer speak to you and you don’t know what to do with them?  Have you tried to use these fabrics as “practice” pieces when trying out new tech niques with stamping, dyeing, painting, stitching, deconstructing, etc ?  then found that you like the finished piece because the background is now quite interesting?  I have on a number of occasions.

Which is why, when I read about an ugly fabric challenge, I responded straight away.

Everyone in the group would receive a piece of fabric, which the owner didn’t like or want anymore, and has 3 months to do things to this fabric – no limit to the number of techniques used but some over-dyeing (using MX dyes) to be done if the piece had not already been hand-dyed.  Only rule to be that photos and descriptions of techniques to be posted on the group’s website.

My piece arrived yesterday and at first I was delighted with what I found in the packet, then dismayed when I realised I would have to change something that is totally me and purple – so much so that my family thought I had been the dyer.

Not ugly purple fabric

After having it hang for 24 hours, I am now looking at it differently, trying to visualise what I can do to change it.  I thing I will discharge some of the deep colour first with de-colourant, but I will need to think long and hard about the design before I attempt anything – there’s no going back once started on that course.

I’ll keep you posted

 

Scarves and caterpillar quilt

A while back I acquired a number of bright turquoise scarves, large, fringed/tasselled, and 50/50 silk and cotton, lovely to feel and wear.  But I wasn’t all that keen on the colour, so decided to change it.

Original turquoise scarf

The first one I used Procion MX dyes and manipulated the scarf to have 2 colours – navy blue on one side lengthways and a bluey-green on the other half

blue, green & discharged

and then later discharged with a floral spray stencil.  The blue moved a bit far but you can see the overall effect. It is a lovely elegant evening stole.

Then last week I thought to try dyeing with beetroot – not successful.  I thought the colour might change to a sapphire or lavendar blue, but not at all, it now looks like a washed out pale green/grey  with some black streaks, not very inviting at all.

Here it is on the left in this photo where it looks more blue than it really is.

3 turquoise scarves

I have three more scarves and I think  I will dye them with procion for a more reliable and predictable result.

Meanwhile, the caterpillar quilt has another border

The next border will I think be a narrow strip of red, before a wide 4 or 5 inch border of the same yellow fabric as the first border.  I was going to use the spotted red fabric for that border (the same design as the blue border fabric), but it is such a busy quilt, I think it needs something quieter, maybe just a single wide border of the dark plain red instead.  What do you my readers think, add a comment and let me know your thoughts on this.  Which way should I go?

Waging war on wallabies & discharging blue dyes

For the past few years we have been growing vegetables and herbs in old apple bins quite successfully. The bins are high enough to reach into the middle, so it’s easy to get at the rhubarb or chives or silverbeet leaves.  We thought we had beaten the wallabies by having everything out of their reach.  So you can guess what I thought this morning when I saw the results of last night’s feeding frenzy.

The potato crop was doing very nicely and beginning to flower until …  You’ve heard of growing potatoes under straw, but perhaps this is going a bit far.

Every plant lush enough to be draping itself over the sides of the bin had been denuded overnight.  So I built a wall of straw  leaving the plants just enough room in the middle of the bin.  Any wallaby big enough to get at the leaves now is not a wallaby, it’s a  kangaroo….

Meanwhile in the studio, I have been experimenting a bit more with discharging dye with my silk and cotton scarves with interesting results. I heard that some dyes and colours did not discharge very well, especially a particular blue Procion dye.  So the scarves I chose to work on all had some blue in the colour mix.

Blue scarf wet discharge paste

Blue scarf after discharging dye

The result even after discharging twice on this piece of silk is almost invisible.

Then I tried it on a green and lilac knitted cotton (T-shirt fabric) and blue and green woven cotton scarves.

You can see from these photos that the blue dye is quite resistant to the discharge paste, but it does give a lovely subtlety to the design.  On the last photo, the result is so subtle that it really only shows up with a flash, otherwise it is almost invisible. 

I tried discharging on some painted scarves that I wasn’t happy with, and there was no result at all with one I had painted with Genesis Liquid Radiance – a very permanent colour indeed.

There’s no problem discharging dye from red orange pink or yellow.

There’s always a good discharge on these colours.