Use Your Treasures!

I was inspired by a recent blog post by Melanie Testa, where she writes that she's been printing cloth for years, and now wants to use up her stash completely instead of stashing and storing fabric. I can relate to that. I have loads of my own fabrics in my stash too. Some of the cloth is ugly, some is precious to me. But the point is: there is no point in storing it. It deserves to be used! "Using the things you have and make causes you to make more, doesn’t it?" Melanie says. And she's right! Whatever fabric I've dyed or printed - I can make more of! And if there is one that is exquisitely special and unrepeatable, well, why not use it for something I use every day so that I can enjoy it all the time? Why should I keep it folded up in a box? And when I make more fabric, there will be more exquisitely special and unrepeatable fabrics to use.

So, as a warm-up, I decided to make a coaster set from some of my hand-dyed fabrics that have a Japanese feel to me. I combined them with linen as a backing fabric, as I love the combination of printed cotton and plain linen.

The techniques that have been used to pattern the fabrics are: low water immersion dyeing, shibori, direct dye painting and printing, soy wax resist and discharge. I was quite surprised by how many techniques I'd managed to tick off!

Thanks for visiting my blog! Go forth, my friend, and use your fabrics. And then: make (or buy) more lovely fabric!

Emo...

... but not what some may think. No, I'm not going to write about music and gloomy teenagers. I'm still preoccupied with dye. If you've been following my dyecation you might remember that I started on Monday (five days ago) with a Finnish brand of fibre reactive dyes by Emo-Tuotanto. I was suspecting that the dye was too old and that it wouldn't work, and decided to put it to the test. I'm glad to say that it yielded a very dark blue, so I won't have to throw it out yet.

Some of the fabric samples I did were very successful, others less so. But the less successful ones were like that due to bad technique rather than bad dye. The shibori samples were too loosely tied (I thought I didn't have to tighten them as much when they weren't going in a proper dye bath), the fabric I thought was going to be marbled was hardly marbled at all (so it just looked like a bad dye job) and the printing with liquid dye would have worked if I hadn't got a bit carried away and dribbled dye over it to make things merge a little (everything merged). But not to worry. I came up with a surface design solution, which I'll show you below.

Here are the ones that I felt were most successful:

The floral motif was made with wire that I bent into a flower shape and dipped into melted soy wax before stamping with it, and the stripey pattern was made with a silicone brush. These dark blue fabric would look great combined with sashiko embroidery...  :-9

As for the stamped sample, I rescued it by stamping over it again with the same stamp, but this time I used discharge paste instead of dye. I have a jar of Jacquard discharge paste in my stash of 'Things To Try Soon' (remember my stranded 'Try a New Thing Every Day'-challenge?), so that was two for the price of one: fabric improved and a new thing tried. In fact, I got so inspired by the discharge process that I picked out the bad marbling sample too and a stencil I've been wanting to try, and used the paste with that.

I cut this stencil in December, but was so exhausted by the way my life was going at that time that I never got round to trying it out. It's a bit tricky to use, because it's really too intricate to be a stencil. It would work better as a silk or thermofax screen. But I got a bit carried away... Again.

I cut it out very carefully, and can use the negative image as a mask. That's another two for the price of one!

I needed Something for my Bathroom

In my last post I wrote about the Franka wall quilt that I want to make to remind myself of a special moment. If anyone wonders, I haven’t got very far yet. I’ve scanned the image, resized it, printed it and blue-tacked it to my wall. And then other things started to demand my attention. I have a little project for a friend that I need to finish. I also have another project for a friend that I need to get cracking with. And I needed something for my bathroom.

The ‘something for my bathroom’ won this time, and so I picked out Rashida Coleman-Hale’s book ‘I Love Patchwork’.(Follow this link if you want to look inside the book.) I love this book, because it’s full of charming little projects that are just calling out to me: ‘Make me, make me!’ I decided to make a small basket for bathroom stuff based on the utensil basket she describes in the book. This is the result:

I used mainly commercial fabrics, but one of the fabrics is my own. The one with a citrus pattern is made with thickened Procion MX dye, soy wax and monoprinting. I followed the instructions in Melanie Testa’s book Inspired to Quilt when I designed it. The citrus shapes are made with a plastic thingy that came out of a jar of sundried tomatoes in oil, which I dipped in melted soy wax and applied to the fabric. I then painted around and inside the soy wax shapes with thickened dye, covered the shapes with a new layer of wax to protect them and monoprinted the background. Here's the basket put to use:

Batik med sojavax

Den här veckan har jag experimenterat med batik och sojavax. Sojavax är ett miljövänligare alternativ när man vill jobba med vaxbatik. Det är lätt att applicera och relativt lätt att få bort när man är klar. Jag har ännu inte hunnit skaffa något mera avancerat kärl att smälta vaxet i, så jag använder mig av en lykta som egentligen är tänkt för doftolja. Den fungerar utmärkt så länge som jag inte behöver några stora mängder vax. ;-)

Det är kanske vanligast att man färgar tyget genom färgbad när man jobbar med batik, men i det här experimentet har jag prövat den teknik som Melanie Testa beskriver i Quilting Arts Magazine (nr 45, juni/juli 2010). Hon väter tyget efter att ha applicerat vaxet och målar det sedan med tygtrycksfärg. Efter att tyget har torkat kan man sedan applicera mera vax och färg på samma sätt, och fortsätta bygga upp lagren tills man är nöjd. Mitt tyg innehåller 5 målade färglager (gult, ljus orange, mörk orange, rött, svart; tyget var ursprungligen vitt). Jag applicerade ett nytt vax- och färglager varje kväll under en veckas tid. Sedan strök jag tyget mellan massor av tidningspapper för att få bort det mesta av vaxet och fixera färgen. Till slut tvättade jag tyget i hett vatten.

Soy Wax Batik

This week I've experimented with soy wax batik. Soy wax is a more environmentally friendly alternative when you want to work with batik. It's easy to apply and relatively easy to remove when you're finished. I haven't yet managed to get myself any more advanced pot to melt the wax in, so I use an oil warmer. It works like a charm as long as I don't need any greater quantities of wax. ;-)

It's probably more common to immersion dye the fabric when you work with batik, but in this experiment I tried the technique that Melanie Testa describes in Quilting Arts Magazine (issue 45, June/july 2010). She wets the fabric after she has applied the wax, and then paints it with fabric paints. When the fabric is dry, you can apply more wax and more paint in the same manner and continue building layers until you're satisfied. There are 5 painted layers in my fabric (yellow, light orange, dark orange, red and black; the original colour was white). I applied a new layer of wax and paint every evening during the week. After this, I ironed the fabric between many layers of newspaper to remove most of the wax and heat set the paint. Finally, I washed the fabric in hot water.

 Redskapen - The tools

 Det färdiga tyget - The finished cloth