6.14.2013

30 Days of Creativity: Week 2

Here's week two of my 30 Days of Creativity activities. I have yet to follow any of the themes, but I am pretty okay with that.

Day Eight: knit acorns.
Knit acorns, pattern here.
Day Nine: fabric covered magnetic project board with complimentary magnets.
I think the biggest accomplishment of this project was that I actually mount it to the wall instead of leaving it on the floor for months.
Day Ten: top whorl spindle.
Another spindle, this time substantually smaller. The whorl is walnut and the shaft is cherry. Weighting 1.3oz, it came out a bit lighter than I had planned, but it spins super fast and smooth so I am happy. Perhaps I will try to make a heavier spindle next week.
Day Eleven: yarn bombed a local statue.
Another collaborative effort with my friend Jessi, we turned these kids into superheroes.
Day Twelve: carded some of my hand dyed fiber and spun a chunky yarn.
My plan for the day was cyanotypes, but due to multiple chemical failures I went with yarn. I have three skeins of this, now to come up with a project.
Day Thirteen: dyed some brown yarn black and some white yarn yellow for a future project.
Okay, this one is not terribly exciting, but it is for what I think will be the best of the  30 day projects.
Day Fourteen: painted bike bell (take 2.)
I hand painted the dots so they aren't perfect like I had originally planned, but once finished I was happy with the imperfection so I will call this a success. 

6.07.2013

30 Days of Creativity: Week One

Instead of trying to blog everyday for the 30 Days of Creativity challenge I am going to do a weekly wrap-up entry here. If you want to see my daily entries as they happen, you can check out the Twitter feed I set up for the challenge.

Day One: I heart Kentucky block print.
The first day of the challenge just so happened to be Kentucky's birthday so I created a linocut of the state and printed cards.
Day Two: dyeing with red onion skins.
I did blog this one- here.
Day Three: turning a Navajo spindle.
My fist disc on the lathe. I had some issues with the grain, mainly me trying to make the wood do what I wanted instead of doing what the wood wanted, but overall I am happy with the result. It is a 30" spindle weighing 5.45oz with a cherry whorl and a walnut shaft and it's totally balanced.
Day Four: fabric fortune cookies.
This was a joint effort with my friend Jessi. We made fabric fortune cookies, filled them with fortunes and compliments and hid them around downtown for others to find.
Day Five: dyeing Lincoln locks.
I bought a bunch of Lincoln locks at the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber fest last month and I am slowly dyeing them up in bright colors for future projects.
Day Six: overspun mohair single.
Spun from a mohair/wool cloud I carded, it is the beginning of a future project.
Day Seven: spray painting my bike basket and adding some crochet heart streamers.
My original plan was to paint my bike bell, but I couldn't resist  spray painting the basket and adding some streamers as well. I painted the bell, but it was a failure so I will have to sand it down and try it again on another day.


6.03.2013

Dyeing with Red Onion Skins

After the workshop, Chris and I set a goal of dyeing twice a month for the entire summer and documenting what we learn. We each have different goals in this, but we both want to learn what is available in this area of the country and how to get the best colors from what we have. Our first experiment was with red onion skins, mostly because I have never died with onion skins and I wanted to give it a shot. I have been taking all of the onion skins at the grocery store when I do my weekly shopping and even though I left with a sizable bag each time, it took me 5 weeks to gather enough skins for one dyebath.

215g of onion skins collected in my Grubby, a counter top compost collector given out by the city. I have vermicomposting in my kitchen so this bin sat unused until now, it's perfect for onion skin collection.
There isn't a lot of specific information on onion dyeing, I think most people just throw in some skins and hope for the best, but since we are keeping records of everything we are doing, I decided a 1:1 ratio of skins to fiber would be a good place to start- that seems to be at the top of the range and will give us the most saturated color. Next was the issue of mordanting. Onion skins don't require a mordant, but the use of one will give you more colorfast results so I went with a 15% wog alum and 6% wog cream of tarter solution (the cream of tartar acts as an assist and ideally I would have done a batch with and a batch without to judge the results, but time did not allow for that. We might readdress this later in the summer after I collect more skins.)

For the actual extraction, I put the skins in a paint strainer and then large pot of hot water and slowly raised the temperature to the 180-190F, a bit below boiling. Everything I read said to boil the skins, but I am not sure that is good for the color. I have nothing to base this on, but I feel like extracting at the higher temperatures will result in more browning so for this go I decided to keep the temps on the lower side. This might mean that I didn't get as much color and it might result in a different color, that's something I will have to address later in the summer. One last note on the extraction- onion skins smell like onions when you add water (surprise, right?) so they might be best used outside.

I really love these 5 gallon paint strainers, they keep all the little pieces together so that you can pull it all out at once and get straight to the dyeing.
After the extraction, we pulled out the onion skin bag and put another bag in with the yarn- one superwash, one not. We let everything simmer around 180F for about 35 minutes. As expected, Chris's superwash absorbed quite a bit more dye making it a deep rich brown.

Final dry skeins. On the left is the regular wool and on the right is the superwash,.
When we pulled everything out there was still a good amount of dye in the water so we threw in some wet unmordanted fiber to soak it up. The fiber ended up a khaki brown which was a bit blah so we added some iron to the dye water in the last few minutes which shifted the color to a really nice green.

The difference in the two colors is pretty dramatic, hard to believe they came from  the same dyepot.
Next time my plan is to use a .5:1 ratio of skins to fiber, skip the alum mordant, and follow with an iron bath to try and get a nice deep green, we'll see.

6.01.2013

Dyeing with marigolds and madder

After the workshop there was some leftover dye stuff that Dagmar let us take. I grabbed a bag of marigold heads and a jug of the madder extract dyebath with a little cochineal mixed in. I took advantage of the recent surge beautiful weather to dye some yarn. My original plan was to use only the marigolds and leave the madder for overdyeing some cotton that I don't like a little later. The dye that comes from the first extraction of the marigold heads is a rich, golden color. I love the color, but decided I wanted to go more orange with this batch so I ended up adding about half of the madder stock to the pot.

On the left is the marigold dye stock and on the right is the marigold with the added madder/cochineal stock.
I mordanted the original skeins in a 15% wog alum bath and let them sit overnight. After I finished, there was still a bit of dye left in the pot so I filled up the rest of the gallon jug that was storing the madder/cochineal dye with some of the leftover stock. I then mordanted another skein in a 15% alum bath and dyed with what was left in the jug giving me a redder orange.

On the left, the marigold with a bit of the madder/cochineal and on the right,  the madder/cochineal with a bit of marigold. 
This weekend, Chris and I are going to try and get some good greens out of red onions skins. Hopefully things will go as planned, I will post about that next week.