Dyed in the Wool

Here's what I've been doing today. This is a pretty lousy photo but I dyed lots of wool today. I needed to dye some for my prize give away. That's the blue green to the left. Then I needed some for Christmas gifts. I tried to dye some maroon to match Griz colors and I did a very poor job.


I had felted these coasters last week and now I dyed them green. I've been meaning to experiment with using thickened acid dyes for surface design and finally got around to doing that today.



I thickened the dye with sodium alginate. And then used a foam brush to put it on stamps...


and stencils.



Here's one close up. This one is stenciled. This is before steaming.

Here they all are before steaming.


And after steaming and rinsing. It worked!! Now I'm going to do a little stitching on these. This was great fun and even though you can't get a lot of detail on the felt, it still gives a good imprint if you use a chunky stamp or simple stencil without a lot of detail.

I had left over thickened green dye. So I did some leaf printing on an old wool blanket. Boy was that messy. I will do further work on this later. It's steaming now. I still have leftover dye. I put it in the refrigerator. Remind me in 6 months to get it out and throw the science experiment away.

Here are some Wensleydale locks that I dyed as well. Some are blue/green and the others are the same green that I dyed the coasters with first.

Here's a close up. They are drying. Now I have lots of dyed wool to hopefully get through all the Christmas gifts I am making. After Christmas, I always say "I'm not making all those Christmas gifts next year," but somehow, I always find myself in November and December busy making gifts. Why is that?

And the Winner Is...

Congratulations to Textile Traveler!! I used the random number generator and you were lucky number 13! Please let me know your snail mail address and I'll send you out a blue and green woolly goodie package per your color request. Thanks everyone for leaving such lovely comments. It's nice to hear from you all.

GrizWear

I made two hats today. We've got another football game to go to tomorrow and it's going to be cold again. So even though these look like Christmas hats in red and white, they are really maroon and grey. The light today is very poor as it is cloudy and rainy. There was snow on the ground again this morning.

Here's a close up of the griz paw. There is one stitched on all four panels of the hat.

Here's the other hat in the opposite color scheme with the hat grey and the brim maroon.

Here's the griz paw detail. What do you think of the head? It was an old, crummy looking wig stand of Styrofoam. I spray painted it with the spray paint that is supposed to look like rocks. It's quite textured and came out fairly well. I made two of them for the store for hat displays but they are still at home so I used it for these photos.

If you haven't signed up for my 200th post give away, you need to sign up now. Tomorrow is the last day. Just go to the previous post and leave me a comment. It's great hearing from all of you and thanks, as ever, for leaving such lovely comments.

Surf's Up for my 200th Post

This piece was done for the October challenge on the Felting Forum, "Sea and Sky".


I used a combination of wools, scrim, silk and a recycled fulled sweater for the backing.



It's called "Surf's Up". It's all done on my Janome needle felting machine.

Have you heard about the TV program "Talking Threads" in the UK? You can watch it online on Country Channel TV. There will be 10 episodes. The first two are already available. It has some great instructions on various fiber arts. There is also a great series called Inspirations about 5 textile artists in the UK. Just put "textiles" in the search engine at Country Channel TV and it will come up.

This is my 200th post today. In celebration, I am having a give away prize of woolly goodies (merino, mixed breed wool, Wensleydale locks, silk etc.) to a randomly picked commenter. All you need to do is comment on this post and let me know the colors you prefer and I'll dye them to your choice. If you don't like to use wool (or are allergic to wool) please let me know and I'll come up with another prize for you if you win. I'll do the drawing on Halloween (Oct. 31) and announce the winner on November 1st. Make sure that I have a way to contact you (I get a lot of comments that are no reply blogger comments and sometimes it is difficult to contact people). Thanks to everyone who reads my blog, I always appreciate your comments and suggestions. Hope you have a great weekend.

Sneak Peak

Here's a peak at what I've been working on. It's a very large piece currently and I'm considering writing an article on the whole process and submitting it to some magazines. We'll see how that goes. It was a bit frustrating today as my sewing machine was giving me fits. Not really the sewing machine's fault as the piece was too thick for sewing really. But I kept going and finally managed to get this step complete. It's drying now and then on to the next step.

This is my 199th post so keep your eyes peeled. I will be doing a give away with my 200th post. I am going to give away some wooly supplies or if you don't like wooliness, I'll get some other supplies together. Thanks to everyone who follows my blog and for everyone who leaves comments. I really appreciate all you cyber friends!

Grizzly Flower Pins and Greeting Cards

Here are the pins that I made for Homecoming yesterday. They were made from the scraps leftover from the scarves and some cute buttons I found. We won the game (even though we nearly froze to death) so the pins must have brought good luck!


Here are some cards that I made. I had made the paper quite some time ago for a book which I didn't use all these pages. So I cut them up and glued them to cards. Now I have some greeting cards when I need them.



Here's a card made from dyed papers.




And another of the cards like the photo above with a bit of dyed paper behind it.

Winter, Anyone?

So this is the scene that I woke up to this morning. The high today was 31 degrees F.


Because it was so cold, this light layer of snow froze on the roads and made everything really slick. Luckily now it has almost melted off the roads. We are off to a Grizzly football game tomorrow and it's is supposed to be similar weather. So I decided we needed a couple of scarves.



So here is the one I made for DH. It's reversible with a thread sketched Griz paw.




Here's the whole scarf. They are made from fleece.





And here's my scarf. I'm sure everyone has already made one of these years ago but I never had. It's super easy though. So hopefully, we won't freeze tomorrow. I'm also making some flower pins out of leftover fleece. I found some great griz paw buttons. I'll take photos when they're done. I can always finish them on the two hour trip down to Missoula. Go Griz!

New Felting Technique and Featured Artist

Zed from the Felting Forum showed us a site that had instructions for an easy to do felting technique. You lay out layers of fibers choosing ones with lots of texture. You should lay them out on something that won't stick to your fibers. I used a nylon netting. This was OK on this green piece but did not work on the grey/black piece. I will use sheeting next time. You then stitch it all together. I just basted with a heavy thread.


Here's the photo of the other one. I used heavy thread and then pulled tightly to get more texture.



Here's the green one after coming out of the washing machine. The netting came off easily. I just threw both of these in the wash with some other things I was washing. It is very textured and was super easy to do.




Here's the black/grey one. This is a bad photo but you can see that lots of the netting felted to this. I just ripped it off in shreds.





Here's how I used the green one.






And here's the black/grey one. The netting still stuck on just gives it more texture ;0)







Due to a late cancellation from another artist, I am the featured artist for Gallery Nights in October at my gallery, The Purple Pomegranate. I set up all my work today. Had a bit of a problem with the jelly fish light. It has an acrylic lamp shade under the wool and the acrylic was melting - aaaaaahhhhh...... So I had to re-do it a bit. The wool part was fine so I got new washers to go over the hole (now enlarged) in the acrylic part and got a 7 watt light bulb which changes colors. In the dark, it looks really cool but now it's really just a night light.








Here's another view.









The back wall.










And my thread sketched pieces. So opening night is tomorrow night - wish me luck!

More Shibori Scarves

Here are the shibori scarves that I finished today.


Lots of colors and I'm really tired.



Plus my hands are a weird color.




Here are a few closeups.





I'm glad these are finished!

Shibori!

I have wanted to do some shibori pole wrap dyeing for a while now but I just hadn't gotten it done. I did two scarves today. I also did the base dying for 9 more scarves and 1 wrap. So I've got a bunch more wrapping to do. Here is one of the scarves wrapped on the pole.

Here is one of the completed scarves hanging on the front porch.

Here's a closeup of the scarf above. It looks like flames.

Here are the rest of the scarves, waiting to be wrapped.

And these are some pages I painted with leftover dye. Not sure what I'll do with them but perhaps I'll use them in making some greeting cards.