'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Thursday 7 January 2010

Snow dyeing, embroidery and a walk in the sunshine.

jan 2010

Not tutti-frutti sorbet, but some rather mucky snow –which melted pretty quickly despite sub-zero temperatures outside.

This is even more experimental than usual as I used some elderly Dylon cold dyes – heaven only knows why I had ‘Sunshine Yellow’, ‘Mandarin’, and ‘French Blue’ but that’s what they were and I decided it was time to use them up. Fingers crossed that they are not too old. They are batching by the boiler now and will be rinsed and washed tomorrow.

degree 20104I worked on this last night – blah interim version on the left, ‘finished’ version on the right. I decided to use some in-your-face, why-did-I-ever-buy that? holographic gold thread and work FME squiggles in the jar-opener shape. And then I added some zigzag stars, with purl tails. Not sure it works but it’s ‘only a sample’ and it is no longer blah.

Top-8.BMP

And today I did this with  the transfer dyed sheer and felt.  You can’t really see the felt under the sheer but I think it helps to intensify the colours. The stitch is a narrow satin stitch – it is a bit irregular, due partly to having a very loose top tension and partly to a dirty machine – things got better after I cleaned it. However I quite like the blips.

It is now in the washing machine shrinking – I hope. *

I only started working with these colours because they were, more or less, the colours of the original collage – but I have come to like them. I suppose they are a sort of split complementary, although I’m open to correction on colour theory!

IMG_0248 In between all this textile activity we had a short but pleasant walk down the road to the golf course – although it was more of a tobogganing and snowball fighting course this morning. 

 

IMG_9430

This is the last of my daily picture posts – and the last trees in the book. Cut up magazine photos, inspired by Mondrian's trees. 

* The purple piece hasn’t shrunk – which proves fairly conclusively that the felt that wouldn’t dye wouldn’t, because it is not viscose-wool felt. Mmm – I do have rather a lot of it.

It will transfer dye though – and I suppose I could always use it for padding a print table, which is what I bought it for originally …

 

No comments: