Using madder to dye

Madder is the root of a plant, which gives various red, pinks and browns of different hues.  On Sunday I went to a workshop run by Lizzy Emery, the third one of hers that I have taken.  She shared her extensive knowledge on natural dyes and mordants, this time Madder.  One of my pieces was a merino wool scarf, which I folded with metal clamps into triangles, and this was the result (I love this, I was so delighted with it).  The mordant was alum, which I have not yet used myself, it had been premordanted when I bought it at Adventuress, where the workshop was held in Port Adelaide.

a lovely chestnut for madder dye on wool

Natural Dyes

Recently I've become very interested in Natural Dyes and Mordants.  I tried to set up a new Page here to devote to my experiments in dyes, but Blogger wouldn't co-operate so I'll just use the usual Page.

My first attempts were at a workshop run by Rosi Gates, who is one of my fellow Textilers as well as a member of other art groups.  She has been exploring natural dyes for a while now and I was able to benefit from her experience at a workshop recently.  We used, among other things, eucalyptus leaves on silk to print some lovely effects.

eucalyptus leaves on silk

Once I was home again, my attempts were somewhat paler, though rather nice and delicate:

variety of eucalyptus leaves on silk

eucalyptus cinerea - comes out a pinky colour, on silk again

My main information now is coming from a book by India Flint called Eco Colour though I have borrowed a couple of others from the library, and of course the internet is full of information.  I bought Eco Colour from Dymocks because I wanted to support a local retailer - not many bookshops left in Adelaide.  I do often order books elsewhere to save money but other times my conscience kicks in and I try to buy locally.
The next thing I tried as a natural dye was Red Cabbage - easy and cheap to buy at the greengrocer (means going to another shop after the supermarket, but if we don't use them they will eventually close down and give us no option but the supermarket).  There is lots of information about dyeing with red cabbage on the internet, such as this one, and I used a quarter for each of my two stainless steel pans (which I bought from local Op Shops, one $5, one $6.50).  Chopped up with about 5 litres of water in each, I used in one pan some cotton sheeting, (an Actil 100% cotton from the Op Shop) that had been mordanted in washing soda, and in the other pan a piece that had been mordanted in vinegar.  I'll talk more about mordants in another post, but I wanted to show you the difference in colours with the different mordants, because the mordants are different pH's, and therefore take up dyes differently.

This shows my first attempt with red cabbage dye.  That lovely pale blue was on the cloth mordanted in washing soda; the lilac in vinegar.  However the blue dried such a pale colour you couldl barely see it, in fact when dry the camera picked up no colour at all, it appeared white.

This was my second attempt with red cabbage dye, complete with bits still stuck on the fabric - not strained  perfectly.  This was mordanted in vinegar.  The colour is slightly uneven from sitting in the pan unstirred overnight.

More to come -  about my results at a Madder workshop - next post.

Freestyle machine embroidery

I've been working hard on extending my machine embroidery skills.  I've been following mainly a book called "Freestyle Machine Embroidery" by a textile artist I admire greatly,  Carol Shinn.  She gives lots of detailed information, and exercises which I found very useful to follow through.  The book is available from Amazon.  In the end I made a piece inspired by my recent holiday to Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory depicting my favourite scene - a Jabiru eyeing the river cautiously, as he was surrounded by saltwater crocodiles.

Jabiru, freestyle machine embroidery on soluble film using a loopy stitch worked upside down.  Appliqued to dyed and machined  background of nets and laces, 

Textile Books

A while ago I made a textile book out of habotai silk, but was unable to complete it, because I could not get the binding right.  I tried several methods of making these four double-sided pages stand up on a structure, so that I could exhibit it open.  None worked, the 12" pages were simply too big and floppy.  Lesson learned, don't make floppy pages if you want it to stand, use something solid inside the pages like heavy cardboard or buckram.

Anyway, I realised that if I was going to complete this project and relieve it of a life at the top of the cupboard, I would have to find another way.  I decided to do the obvious and put hinges on the pages in such a way that it would lie flat and the pages could be turned normally.  Being two silk pages with cotton batting in between and being hand-quilted (back when I could still hand-quilt) it needed something fairly delicate.  A rivet hole was going to be too harsh and heavy, dragging on the fabric and out of keeping.

I can't hand stitch holes any more so I tried a sample piece of machine stitching a circle, free motion stitching (feed dogs down, darning foot on, straight stitch).  Using plain white thread, this worked well.

The circular hole machine stitched around 3 or 4 times

Next step - cords to tie through the holes, which had been cut open with a seam ripper and applique scissors (carefully!). Here's how I used some strips of silk scraps to make machine cords (switch to zig zag, size 4 worked well) - the rest of the above machine settings remain the same.  Twist the strip round and round while anchored by the needle through the strip - have about an inch (a few centimetres) sticking out at the top to grab hold of - then feed the strip through.  The zig zag will keep the twist in and make a cord.  I made one for each hole (five) and fed them through, cut the ends off and tied each in a reef knot.  I did pull up the knots loosely at first and checked that the pages were turning comfortably, then tightened the knots.

The book with the tied hinges

"Breaking Boundaries" exhibition by the Textilers

The textile art group that I belong to, Textilers, has just held an exhibition in which we made the effort to break our artistic boundaries.  I would say that everyone succeeded very well.  It was a terrific show.  These are my own entries.

Meditation Bowl - totally recycled yarns from Op Shops over strips of recycled fabrics.  Boundary Broken - using traditional coiling with non-traditional basketry materials.

Phoenix Regenerating - rayons threads in machine-embroidered feathers and head, real feathers.  Boundary Broken - extending my machine embroidery skills.

detail of above

Rundle Mall.  Machine-stitched figures from my sketches.  Boundary Broken - drawing people, fifty years after being told I couldn't draw.

detail of above

Machine stitching feathers

I have been working on one of my favourite things – feathers.  I love the softness, the colours, of feathers.  A wall hanging I have just made combines stitched feathers with real ones.  

In the first picture, you can see a stitched semi-plume feather which is one that has the central shaft (the rachis) and vanes with barbs, but no barbules, which are the tiny hooks on the ends that zip the edges of the feather together and keep the shape.  So it looks much like a little fluffy Christmas tree.  You will notice how I have stitched this with a few machine stitches to a shred of wool roving and the feather itself is in variegated metallic thread.

The next picture shows a couple of feathers stitched in bright yellow rayon thread.  I have combined these with yellow wool roving and a real feather – that’s the white one.

I have left lots of loose threads because I like the texture, and it helps to give a slightly raised look, along with the feathers themselves being malleable, as they are stitched on water-soluble film.  Always do at least two lines over each other before dissolving.  The result if you don’t is distinctly weird!

Cable stitch

Continuing with my machine embroidery experiments, I tried cable stitch – that it, working upside down so that the bobbin thread is the right side.  I used a red silk hand embroidery thread in the bobbin – wound on by hand – and white top thread.  The top tension is loosened, the bobbin tension tightened.  Do this a little at a time –it is better to buy a separate bobbin holder to use for machine embroidery tension loosening, as it can be hard to return the screw to the correct position for normal sewing.  The top thread will appear to be couching the bobbin thread and as the feed dogs are down, you can make the appearance of the couching very close to spread far apart.  In the small end of my paisley, you can see how working straight stitch rows on top of each other gives a heavy texture.  I can imagine this becoming valuable when working rock strata in a landscape, or various other more conceptual types of work.  Notice also how, on the curves, there evolves some straight stitches at right angles to the line of the bobbin thread – still the top thread coming through but it stretches out as you move the stitch line on a diagonal.  

Adelaide Rosella

The Adelaide Rosella is a local hybrid of the Yellow and Crimson Rosella.  Recently I started to spend more time on developing my skills in machine embroidery.  This is because arthritis prevents me from hand embroidery now.  So I decided to extend myself into this area, which I had previously touched on but nothing further.  I bought a book by Carol Shinn called Freestyle Machine Embroidery, and started working through the exercises.  Following the exercise on blending of colours, (feed dogs down) I completed my Adelaide Rosella by blending on the belly area, during which I found it was better to use the lighter colour to make the last layer or it didn’t show up enough.  It is important to have enough shades in the colour chosen that are close enough to grade smoothly, and I found that harder than I expected – my orange-yellows blended better than did my orange-reds, you can see that in the photo.  Once more a hoop upside down was important to avoid too much distortion (that will be a future project in itself, using distortion for effect) and frequent steam pressing on the wrong side was important also to pull out the inevitable buckling that does occur.  In her book Carol Shinn gives detailed instructions for colour blending – a terrific resource.

Machine Sketching

Early this year I started working on something I had not attempted for 50 years – figure sketching.  When I was at school, I was told I had no artistic ability, after drawing a circus scene complete with many people in it.  Since then I had no confidence in my drawing and only made stick people.  This year the group I belong to, Textilers, will be mounting our first exhibition.  The name and the aim is Breaking Boundaries – so I thought it was time to resurrect my figure sketching, and I then intended to stitch around the lines.  As usual I looked for and found an appropriate book on the subject, Stitch Draw by Rosie James.  I spent many hours in the next few months observing closely, trying and trying again, and drawing the people I saw in Rundle Mall in Adelaide, one of my regular haunts.  Sitting having a cappuccino means people don’t notice that you are sketching the people around you.  There were some fascinating groups of people at tables, walking around, shopping, using mobile phones and so on.  The fashions they wore interested me as much as the sketches I made, and interpreting them in machine stitch was the enjoyable end result.  I used various backgrounds, such as strips of dyed silk (seen here) using gold and rayon threads; also I used plain colour backgrounds with contrasting stitch colours.  Generally I liked to trace my original sketches onto white or coloured tissue paper and stitch through that, using a hoop upside down, with free motion straight stitch.  The paper could then be removed or left on in places for effect.  Fun!

Ghost nets

Following on from the previous post, one of the inspirations for working with mesh bags was finding out about "ghost nets" - discarded fishing nets that continue to float in the sea, catching fish, turtles and other marine life for no one, simply as pollution destroying marine life.  How careless, how uncaring of our planet's life.   This is a link to a website (http://www.ghostnets.com.au/) that shows how the local indigenous people used these nets to recycle them into art.  Workshops were held in North Queensland to give inspiration to the local people, using experienced fibre artists, such as West Australian Nalda Searles - see this page.

The first mesh basket I made was this one:

basket made from mesh bags 

©Christine Linton

Coiling mesh bags

One of the coiling techniques I wanted to try was coiling mesh bags.  I had tried it once before but didn't really like it because the mesh, being plastic, was so slippery and unpleasant to work with.  So I used a mesh bag with a better feel (still plastic but not so slippery) stitching it with raffia.  I did alternate rows of totally covered bag and open stitching.

Coiling mesh bag stitched with raffia

©Christine Linton

detail of the bag 

©Christine Linton

The result was actually what I wanted - but still, the plastic feel was there, which puts me off continuing in this vein.

Op Shop find

I found this great little circle yesterday in an Op Shop that I hadn't visited before, at Tea Tree Plus.  The shop is enormous, everything classified, packed and labelled.  It seems to be a chain of stores that supports a number of non-profit organisations.  I've put a link in above so you can see what it is about.
This circle seems to be mini tree trunk rings glued to a base.  Couldn't resist it because it was so interesting to look at.

I'm not quite sure what I can put on here now because I'm starting to work on my exhibition work.  Hmmm!

Sea Urchin

Experimenting with some coiling using red raffia, and stitching it with tapestry wool from the Op Shop, I think in a shade called dusky rose.  My experiment was with shaping, and I made a sea urchin; I have found some lovely sea urchin shells down at Corny Point on the Yorke Peninsula, many years ago.

sea urchin made with raffia and wool

©Christine Linton

Embellishments

I like incorporating natural materials into my art, and I have collected some gum nuts of two types, and some small pine cones from Casuarina (Silky Oak).  My plan is to drill holes and hang them from ?something?  Before drilling I decided to paint them with gouache - I find that things painted with acrylic paint tend to stick to each other.

painted seeds

©Christine Linton

These will decorate a largish item; the smaller gum nuts could possibly embellish a journal but the large pine cone, although only about the size of a thumbnail, would be too heavy for small or light artworks. And they are not flat enough to use inside a journal or book.

To see an inspired use of found objects in a hand-made journal of Cornwall, see Under a Topaz Sky blog.

Netting

One of the techniques I learnt at Lizzy Emery's workshop was netting.  We worked around a jar but you can also work between two posts.  After finishing, I sprayed it with starch, twice, drying in between.  It now stands up on it's own though it is made of soft crochet cotton.

©Christine Linton

Cross-techniquing - uh what?

I don't think there is such a word as cross-techniquing, but I am sure there is indeed a term for learning a technique used commonly in Art/Craft Number 1, then using that same technique in Art/Craft Number 2.  What I have in mind is a technique used in textile arts, where you make machine cords by zigzagging on the sewing machine, down strips of fabric, in which the fabric is totally enclosed by the stitches, which gathers it into a cord.  (For those who don't know how to make this, see Linda Matthews here)
What I have done is to take a large number of these cords, and joined them all together with more zig zags.  I rolled this large number of cords into a ball (as in a ball of knitting yarn) to stop them tangling - as I left all the end threads on for effect, this was a real challenge.  Then I used the weaving technique I learnt in Lizzie Emery's workshop (see previous post) to make a small basket.

Machine made cords as a basket - detail

©Christine Linton

 If anyone knows of a real word for cross-techniquing, I'd love to hear from you in the Comments.

My own style

I have been enjoying workshops with Lizzie Emery, and below is a picture of a coiled basket that I made in the basketry class; I have added my own style by firstly stitching the coils together with tapestry wool from the Op Shop, and more so, by adding my own "parcel beads".  I made these one day when I was trying to find a way to make beads from fabric but without using glue.  I was delighted to find a piece to use them on.  They are made from cotton voile dyed with Procion dyes; they are tied together with gold cotton embroidery floss, which I tied up in a circle.  I liked them so much because they were different to anything I had seen, and because they are totally surrounded with frayed edges - my favourite finishing technique!  This sample of 5 beads sat on my design wall for some weeks before I decided this was an ideal place for them to end up.  My design wall by the way is a white door on a cupboard, next to where I sew.  Needs must.

©Christine Linton

Ok the photo is a bit blurry, didn't realise that.  But you get the overall idea, and the parcel beads show up well in the detail photo below.  I am using the basket to store some gum nuts and other seed pods, which I plan to use as embellishments later on.  I always like to use things that I have made if they are practical pieces, though I have overcome the drive to always make stuff that is useful.  I am happy now to make something for art's sake.

©Christine Linton

Making string

Hi I'm back; I haven't been away physically but have been working on ideas, plans and samples for an exhibition I am participating in next year so have not done any experimental work for a while.  I have now started taking part in a workshop at Pepper Street, with basketry and netting.  This first week we made string from plant material; this is a traditional skill world wide.  It is very simple; tie two strips together at the top; bend the right strip back up to the right, then return it to the straight position and bring over the left strip; repeat endlessly.  It is quick and easy, but I found after a while my fingers started to hurt, because I get arthritis in them, so it is something to do in between other tasks that don't affect the fingers so much.  Also you do get to find the natural way to hold and fold the plant material.

This is the coil of string I made, taking about half an hour.

©Christine Linton

You probably can work a lot quicker once you get into the swing of it.

Close up of the string 

©Christine Linton

We also did some coiling which I will show in my next post.  The workshop is run by Lizzie Emery.

Plants as textiles

On a trip to the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, I was fascinated by this coiled up fern in the Bicentennial Conservatory.  I only saw it because a large group of students came walking along the raised boardwalk where I was trying to photograph a turtle in the pond below; to wait until they had gone past, I walked to the other side of the boardwalk and looked at the tall ferns, and was captivated by the texture on this; it reminds me so much of rope or twine or yarn, plaited or knotted, and rolled up inside a strip of polar fleece!

coiled up fern

©Christine Linton

Here is a finished letter further to the post http://craftconversations.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/new-ideas-for-new-year.html 

letter "e", in french knots 

©Christine Linton