Natural Dyed Silk

This is the same piece of silk as in the previous post. The first colour was from cloves. This golden yellow is from Tumeric. It was boiled for an hour. The white spot is light reflecting from the tiles - it is difficult to photograph because it is so transparent and the bathroom tiles gave the best image. The close up photo is the truest in colour. I haven't quite decided whether to do more to this piece or not. I'm going to keep it hanging around to see if I have any further ideas. I think it could be interesting to add some black somehow. Maybe India Ink? Circles?

Natural Dyed Silk

This piece of silk is for the WAFTA exhibit. All members received a piece of silk which we are to dye using any Shibori technique. I have stitched 3 sets of 3 rows of running stitch which I have gathered up. I boiled 4 tablespoons of dried cloves for an hour and then strained off the liquor. Then I boiled the fabric for 1.5 hours in that liquor. I love the smell of cloves - good job as you could smell it all through the house and down the street! Now that it is dry I am going to bind over some of the already stitched parts and boil it with some Tumeric.

Artist Trading Card Preparation

Designing Women are going to swap Artist Trading Cards (ATC's) in July. So I need to make some. So far I have ironed some heavy interfacing to the back of some of the rust-dyed silk I created at the WAFTA "inspiration" workshop a couple of weekends ago. I have 19 that have interesting marks from the stitched shibori resist and 22 less interesting ones. I'm not sure how many we're going to need for our swap but I thought it would be good to have a few on hand so I made up as many bases as I could from the fabric and scraps of interfacing that I had lying around. The final size is to be 2.5 by 3.5 inches so I've cut these 3 x 4 so I can cut them to size once I've decorated them. I've stitched around the edges just to make sure the interfacing stays in place while paint/stitch or whatever. I'm planning to use the stamp I made with circles on it for some of them. I may add some gold or glitz to the ones with the less interesting background. I'm planning to emphasize some of the marks with stitch on the ones with a more intersting background. I have decided to put my website and blog address on the back but I haven't decided how I'm going to do it yet. I may print on t-shirt transfer paper. I may actually get a rubber stamp made up with my logo on it as well. Or I may just opt for the good old-fashioned pen and ink method :-)