Another hot day

I don't feel as if I got a lot done today, I just lose my oomph in the heat.  But the solar dyeing is progressing.  It isn't dramatic but it is only a day so far, so I may get a result.
The clear water has a slight tinge, the small piece of fabric has a pinkish brown colour, as well as still being white in some places.

The other jar has got a slightly darker brown tinge.  No sign of getting any green.

I am still collecting the hollyhock flowers, even though they are drying out on the stems.

I'll have to get motivated to soak some fabric in alum for that dyeing I suppose.  Maybe tomorrow.  Not that is it going to be any cooler tomorrow.  But I don't want to waste that summer weather, it must be good for something.

Looking on the bright side.

Summer is arriving with a blast.  It is going to be hot all week.  I have been celebrating the cool summer so far but now it appears to be gone, gone, gone.
Anyway, I was walking home from the shops when I found a smallish branch fallen off a eucalyptus tree.  I have been trying to get some natural dyeing to be green - in a not very methodical or persistent way.
Aha, I thought, green leaves that haven't been ripped untimely from the tree - by me anyway.  I think I have read somewhere in my meanderings around the web that you can get green dye from green eucalyptus leaves.
Waste not, want not.  I lugged the branch home and braved the glasshouse - it was HOT in there.  But waste not, want not, this hot weather should be good for something.
I now have some silk fabric soaking in glass jars, using all that lovely hot sunshine.

I strongly suspect that nothing much is going to happen, especially for bottom picture, it looks  a lot like clear water to me.

I also put some silk in a jar that has some dye bath I got when we decided to throw out the dandelions, after my disappointing result recently.  The gardener in the family boils them up to kill the seeds and then puts them in the compost.  Why waste all that energy, I thought?  I'll put all the flower heads in and boil them up, see what I get.
What I got was a brownish yellow.  But I decided not to throw it out yet, it might be useful.  I think it is much stronger than my previous sample because I jammed the flowers in, didn't think about just using some to see how it goes, so I can have some left if it goes well.
Then the solar dyeing frenzy came over me - as much frenzy as I can raise on such a hot day. So now there is some silk in that dye too, cooking in the glasshouse.

The hollyhocks are throwing their flowers down in the heat and the heat is desiccating them rather quickly, so I am thinking of trying some solar dyeing using the dried flowers - once I recover from being out there in the middle of the day. I have plenty of days to think about it, it doesn't have to happen today.  The heat will be here for a while now, I think. But, on the bright side, it is inspiring me to play with some more dyeing.
Wonder what I will ever do with all these bits of silk, so many of them brown.

Starting again.

I have abandoned my quilt top, it just won't line up! I may finish it later but I REALLY want to get a piece done for the challenge. So it has been put aside for the moment.
Now I am making it up as I go along.  It started out fairly easily, just try the technique I learnt with Olga Walters. No need to cut out any fabric, I had all of offcuts from the previous attempt.

See, keeping all those little bits is good.

I had a piece of cotton voile that was the right size and I had enough Vliesofix to cover it.

Then I laid out some of the largish bits of the offcuts in a horizontal way, using the unfinished top as a template.

I didn't lay them out too precisely, precise is obviously not my thing. There were some tiny spaces between a few of the pieces of fabric which meant that the much smaller pieces of fabric were now useful.
Then I got to use the long, very thin bits that I just hadn't been able to bring myself to throw away.  You get them when you cut with a rotary cutter and are aligning the edges, ready for the actual accurate cutting.
So they have been laid out vertically.

Beavering away

Oops. It is a week since I posted.  I have been beavering away but don't seem to have made all that much progress. I am working on a small quilt at the moment.  It is for the Living Colour challenge. I have made a couple of quilt tops so far.  Neither is quite what I wanted but I am going to persevere with the current one.  So far I have spent HOURS pulling it apart!!!!!
I thank my tapestry practice for making me so much more patient. There is a lot of unpicking involved in tapestry and I was told it is just par for the course - one teacher even said she will unpick about a third of her work. So I am feeling much more relaxed about using the seam ripper with my quilt.
It also helps that I started early and have time to play around with it.

Yesterday was a crisis day - I had put all the sashing on and then discovered that I had made it TOO LONG - what angst ( and some deleted expletives).  I thought that I would put it aside and move on to my new idea, with the intention of going back to it later.  But then I realised that I would not want to start a day with unpicking as the beginning activity. I made myself unpick all the bits, which included taking out some of the very carefully chosen colours and rearranging the quilt top - very fiddly.  But I soldiered on and, even though it took about 9 hours, got it back to where I started the day.
Today I finished putting it together. I will not post a picture in case I decide it is ok for entering the challenge.  We have been asked not to post images. But I will put in a little bit.  I tried really hard to get the 1" squares lined up (I use the old imperial measurements for quilting, most of the equipment is from the USA) - I even starched them all - but they just wouldn't co-operate.  I'll have to decide what sort of quilting will hide the imperfections.  That is tomorrow's effort,

It is a colour wash quilt, something I have not really done much of before.  I am not sure it will be good enough to enter but I just can't stop now - I have to finish it.  I actually rather like it but it is definitely for viewing from afar, especially if you have blurry eyes like I do.  No close-up viewing allowed.

I do have another idea for the challenge, just hope I have time to develop it and make the quilt.

Dyeing with frozen dandelion flowers

As I posted recently, very recently, I used some frozen flower heads to try dandelion dyeing.  I didn't have that many but I didn't use that much silk either.  I have already said that the colour was a bit blah so put a few grains of copper sulphate to green it up a bit.  That wasn't entirely successful.

However, since rinsing and drying the fabric, I have decided I don't mind the colour, especially with the cotton gauze laid over it.  It is quite pretty really, ever so slightly greenish-yellowish.

Hmm, the photo doesn't show up the greenish, yellowish tinge.  I must try playing around with the camera settings a bit more. Later.

I took Penny, our dog, out for a walk this morning, before it heats up too much for her.  According to the radio, it was only 19C (I can't find the symbol for degrees and I can't be bothered writing the whole word repeatedly) but it was much warmer in the sun.  Penny kept going from shade to shade spot.

She lay down in a little field of dandelion flowers and I was momentarily tempted to pick the flower heads - but it was definitely only a momentary thought.

I like the fabric but I don't have the oomph at the moment to spend the time picking each individual flower. Someone had the thought that I might have got a yellower colour if I had only had the petals but that thought just overwhelms me - fancy picking all the greenery off all those little flowers!  Definitely not worth the effort at the moment.

Then the moment passes as the seasons change.  Maybe next year.
I am currently wishing I had been into dyeing when the oxalis were out, I was a bit slack about that this year. Maybe next year again.
I hope you all have a great year next year - not far away now!
And today is my last chance to have 31/13 as the bookends of the date.

Using dried hollyhock petals for natural dyeing

Today I took the silk out of it's plastic bag.  The dye bath looked much darker and so did the silk. I rinsed it out with water, to get rid of the bits of petal.

Looking much darker.

Then I took it inside to have a proper rinse.

So far, so good.

After it had dried, it didn't smell quite right. I decided to do a final rinse with a little bit of vinegar - well, was that a mistake or not?  I am not sure - but a lot of pink dye came out of the fabric, making it less purple and more like the other blue-grey fabric. I don't know why the vinegar did that.  I suppose it is good to have done it myself and not given it to someone who would be disappointed to have the colour change in that way.

I took a close-up photo of it while it was drying the first time, there were little bits that looked yellowish. I think they might have been from the part of the flowers where the petals are held together.  I didn't mean to have them in there but a few managed to be included. 

This photo came out a lot pinker than it was in actuality.

This is the final piece, dried and ready for me to use - for something, one day.

Still feeling slow

The weather is BEAUTIFUL today.  It is sunny but not hot - perfect summer weather.  Unlike yesterday which was just weird. I took the dog out at 6.00am to beat the heat, it was only 12C and it was a bit cool. Then the day heated up to the mid-30s, then a cool change came - very windy - and brought the temperature right back down to the 20s.  I like it when it doesn't stay hot!
Anyway, I went out and turned over my pieces of silk, still leaving the plant-stuff in with the fabric. It will have had some heat and some warmth. And then some coolth (I read a book once that kept using that word, not sure it exists and can't be bothered looking it up - it's a lazy Sunday, summer afternoon in the holiday period).
This morning I went out and took out the flower heads and threw them in the compost, the alum is supposed to be alright for plants. There were a few tiny spots of colour that could have been from the flowers rotting, I am not sure. They are so tiny that I am not going to worry about them, the tentative plan I have for the fabric requires it to be cut up and appliquéd anyway. So unwanted spots will not matter.
I rinsed out some of the smaller pieces of silk but decided to leave the larger pieces still soaking.

Some are just in jars with the dye bath.
I then decided to experiment further.
I had kept some of the flowers just in the room, letting them dry out.

They have gone much darker and are crumbly.  So I crumbled them further.

They are in a blue ice-cream container and look more purple in the photo than they really were, some were tending towards brown.

I laid out the bits between layers of silk that I had not rinsed, poured in a little more liquid, just to keep it moist, and sealed it in a plastic bag. It is out in the glasshouse, brewing.

I think the liquid is getting more red and darker, but that might be wishful thinking. I will contain myself in patience and have a look tomorrow.
In the meantime, I have rinsed and dried the smaller pieces and they have turned out a lovely grey, with slight blue and purple overtones.  I used some crinkle silk, nubby silk and some velvet.  The gauze cotton has maintained some colour too.

Oh, I decided that the dandelion fabric was just too boring.

I am thinking I will need some green fabric so put in a little copper sulphate to see what happens.  So far the dye bath has turned slightly greenish but I am not sure what the fabric is doing.  I will leave if for a couple of days and see what happens.

It still looks pretty murky.  The fabric may have to be used in appliqué, lots of little pieces hidden among others.