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Dyeing Like Crazy

I’ve been dyeing like crazy to get ready for my December 3rd Sale at the Aldo Leopold Center in Madison.  To be honest, I fear that I made too much.  I’m going to bring a bunch of stuff, display one or two of each type of dyed thing and keep some under the tables.  But you’re in the know, so ask me to bring out more patterns when you stop by my table.

I had a lot of fun dyeing at One One Thousand but only shared pictures through Instagram so here are some collaged screen shots

I’ve been lucky enough to dye in all of the publicly available dye studios in town: Blue Bar Quilts, The Electric Needle and – though it not officially a dye studio – One One Thousand.  They are all my favorite places to dye.  All of them.

So if you are a local dyer, I recommend that you call one up and reserve some time.  They are all equally awesome.  I was treated to a beautiful sunset when leaving One One Thousand so I’m sharing my blurry picture of it with you. I hope I see you tomorrow!!!

 

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Indigo Dye Retreat last summer! w00t!!!!

This retreat has passed and it was a stone cold blast.  We are in the planning phases of our 2017 Deep Into Indigo Retreat(s?).

Wanna stay in the loop?  Sign up here to get updates:

Friday August 26th – Sunday August 28th, 2016

That’s right. A whole friggin’ weekend dedicated to turning things blue!!

It will be at a gorgeous retreat center in Viroqua (round about 2 hours North West of Madison).

Beds? Got you covered
Food? We got this
Gorgeous Location? Check
Fun? A given
Indigo? Duh

I’ll bring the blue and the shibori toys and the awesome Jenina Mella will bring her serious party planning skills to the food and the many details. We’ll all bring the fun.

Simply put, this will rock your (blue) socks off.  Tell all your best friends!!

More details to come as soon as we figure them out.

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Dark Side

I took the batch of shirts that I dyed last week back into my indigo vat at Paradigm Gardens to redip. They got sooooooo dark! I took the batch of shirts that I dyed last week back into my #indigo vat @paradigmgardens to redip. They got sooooooo dark! Woohoo! That's one of the awesome super powers of indigo dye. The more times to dip your fabric in, the darker it gets. #blueandwhite #darkside #madisonwi #cotton #handdyed #blog. Now they will hang fora few days before I wash them. | February 05, 2016 at 01:53PM
Woohoo! That’s one of the awesome super powers of indigo dye. The more times to dip your fabric in, the darker it gets. Now they will hang for a few days before I wash them.

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Socks N Hats

Tomorrow I am dyeing a huge batch of socks and baby hats for the November 22nd Art in the Wright Place sale.  I think, after that, I’m switching to ironing and sale prep.  I’ll share pictures as I go along so you can see what will be there.

Before then, though, I have an Dip into Indigo Class on Saturday, November 14th!  I’ve totally lightened up on the structure so it’s good for any level of experience.  Woooooo!

So much is happening!

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Dye Day!

Yes, Dye Day with an exclamation point!  Because the day was super fun.  I’ve been prepping fabric for a little while now and was planning to dye them on Thursday (today) but I had a meeting and drank so much coffee.  When I got home, dyeing the fabric RIGHT NOW was the only thing that made sense.

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I did some random test fabrics just for fun and practice.  They didn’t all work.  The one on the left is a total mess.  It’s still pretty though.

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I also bought pretty much every white shirt made with natural fibers that were about my size at Goodwill the other day.  Those were really fun to play with.image4(17)

I’m especially pleased with this one.  It looks super awesome.

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I’m a little concerned with the placement of the blue here.  I may have made some shiboobie instead of shibori.  I think I’ll overdye this with another pattern.  image2(16)

More tests just for fun.  Plus a bonus background chicken.

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And a set of a dozen napkins.  There are only 11 because of the mess in the first picture.  That’s ok.  I love learning how to do things and I can always make more. In fact, I ordered two dozen more yesterday.

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INDIGO!!

INDIGO!!

I can’t get enough of it!  We’re getting ready to have an Indigo Immersion Day this Saturday yet I still set up a vat to play with in my back yard.

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 Pretty freaking awesome!

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Because everybody needs blue socks!

 

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This was excessive, wasn’t it.

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Getting all my toys ready to bring out to Still Point farm.

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Here’s the indigo vat with the flower still on it.  Check my events page if you’re local and want to sign up, it’s not too late!

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Left Alone With the Dye Vat

It all started out so innocently…

We had all this indigo left over from our dyeing day and thought we’d knock some more out.
We were deep into experiment mode.

A little of this
A little of that.

Everything looked so awesome!

I’m starting to appreciate the hippy dippy tie dye look that really, as a Madison resident, I should like already.

Cuz it’s dang pretty
Dang Pretty.  I mean that’s just beautiful.
 
Then, Jennifer had to go home and I was left alone with the dye vat…
My conundrum was that I don’t own any white napkins; I sew my own out of funky colored cotton and linen.  I had already dyed any of my light colored dishtowels.

Then I had this sudden realization:  I can always buy more undershirts!

 

I also threw some of my regular every day clothes in there.

This shirt was looking very faded and worn
Not any more.
 
And this white shirt was too sheer – I never wore it.  
Honestly, I only bought in the first place it because it’s a large (the XL was too big) and I’m a sucker for vanity sizing.
 
 
 
That’s ombre dyed, people.  Thanks to Tanya, I know how it works.

Perhaps I went overboard.  I started at about about noon.  It felt like I worked for an hour.  When I went into the house, it was 3:30.  No wonder I was so hungry.
I learned a ton about how indigo behaves and ways to tie things and about good ways to get different hues.
I love learning new stuff!! 
And I had the chickens for company.  
I did exactly this much to finish my linen quilt. So…basically nothing. 
Also, all my clothes are now blue. 
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Worth it!

I still haven’t finished my quilt top.  But for a good reason!  We ran a test indigo dye class with friends.
We have dyed on our own but really want to share the fun with more people so we experimented on some of our friends
Don’t we look organized?
We happen to have amazing, creative and fabulous friends so it was bound to be fun even if we did everything wrong.
We set up a Shibori (tie dye) station.
When collecting scissors, marbles and other fun stuff starts to feel like work, I’ll let you know.
To me it just looks like treasure.
Why else would I take a picture of rubber bands?
We had some Shibori half way put together to share some techniques.
There were samples to show and, because I just have to be me, library books for reference.
The library is an amazing resource, yo.
 
Then we were ready to get serious.
This is about the time that Miranda (of Miranda Beyer Photography) started taking pictures.  You can tell which ones are hers because they are beautiful.  She specializes in newborn baby pictures but every picture she takes looks awesome, she has a great eye.
I make my own Kombucha but I happened to have a bunch of Nessalla Kombucha for some guests.  I decided to forgo getting my bottle deposit back so we could use their growlers to tie fabric around.
When I see what folks made using the bottles…
…all I can think…
…is…
 
Worth it!
We tied.
We dyed.
We untied.
We revealed and then…
…we smiled.
Check out these socks.
We were all in it together.  Here three people are undoing the shibori stuff because we can’t wait to see…
This!
This yarn is ombre dyed and knotted so that it achieves a kettle dyed look.  None of us quite knew how to do it but Tanya was willing and excited to experiment.
And it worked really well.
Here are three pieces made by a woman who said she wan’t a crafty person.
…seriously…
What was she thinking?  Her work is awesome and creative.
Another woman who said the same thing.
I’ll never believe them again!
Everyone felt really comfortable trying out new techniques.
Indigo is a great medium to play with.
A great and messy day was had by all.  We plan on offering an indigo dyeing class this fall in Madison WI.  You can follow us on Facebook and/or Twitter to get an announcement closer to the date if you’re interested.Now get out there and make a creative mess.  I will too.  I’m gonna finish that quilt top, dang it!
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I Stained The Driveway

We ended up with mixed results from our rust dyeing.  
Jennifer had two big pieces of canvas.  This one ended up looking really cool.  
One day soon, it will be an apron.
The other one should have been really amazing, she placed in on coils of wire.  But they didn’t rust, we figure they must have been coated.  
This part sat on the outdoor fireplace grill – a very popular piece.
But this one is fabulous and we learned to test metal first.  If you get it wet and leave it out, you’ll be able to tell if it will rust or not before you play with it.  
I love this, it’s from the grill of the smallest hibachi I’ve ever seen.  Smaller than the one in the link.
This one was wire wrapped around rebar.  It’s my favorite of the stuff I made.  
The lines are from the wire.  
I think it was floral wire – not sure though.  That’s what happens when you buy your supplies at thrift shops and yard sales.  🙂
This is from where the rebar touched the fabric.  I like this part, too.  We’re going to find some larger tubes to wrap fabric around so that more of the fabric gets color.  We’re thinking wine bottles or large pvc tubes.   Stay tuned.
Here’s a sweet little piece that I put on some rail road ties and steel scrubbies. 
 I don’t know how I feel about it, it’s a bit too something something for me.  Geometric, maybe?  
  
I love this.  It’s a sleeve from a horrifying lilac linen jacket – plus sized with a very unflattering cut – it needed a change.  I laid it on top of a steel screen from our outdoor fire pit.  
I love the all over pattern from it.  
This sleeve I wrapped around a rusty wrench with some various washers and metal doo-dads added in.  Its pretty cool, too.
Psychedelic man!
And here’s the shirt.  I think I like it.  I put it on a drain cover that I found on the side of the road several years ago.  I picked it up because…just because.  
This is the back.  I like the front better than the back.  I covered the stain I wanted to cover.  But all over, I’m not nuts about the look.  It looks stained more than dyed.
Here’s the apron with my bonus shadow.  The apron just looks dirty to me.
Up close, if I were to take the time to appreciate the details, I like them.
But parts also just seem dirty to me.  I think I like the all over patterns better.  The splotchy bits don’t work for me at all.  
Next time – and there will be a next time – I might pick up some iron oxide powder.  You can sprinkle it on the fabric and it colors more of it.  I’m hoping the color will look more intentional.  
Also, it took more than 24 hours because we moved the rusty pieces around to different parts of fabrics to dye more of it.  The difference between vinegar and salt was only in the smell.  I didn’t see a difference.  
We learned a ton.  We’ll be trying this out again maybe on a smaller scale.  I laid out a tarp in the driveway and it took up lots of space.  Jennifer came up with the idea of just putting a piece in a plastic bin.  We could always have a piece rusting if we chose to.  It takes up less space and probably wouldn’t stain the drive way.  Oh yeah, I stained the driveway.  
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Rust Dyeing

Time to try something new.  
It seems a little whack-a-doo but that never stops me from trying something.  
In fact, it kinda makes it more tempting, doesn’t it?
The idea is pretty simple.  You take some metal that will rust and put it on or wrap it in some fabric.
Get them wet to encourage rusting.  
We added vinegar to some of the pieces and salt water to others to see which would encourage rusting  better.
I’m thrilled to be rusting this shirt.  It’s an Alabama Chanin design that I made with an old tee-shirt.  It fits me really well but I stopped sewing at this point when I saw the very light but also really big stain on the front.  Oh, that’s why that shirt was in the thrift shop.  So I’m rusting over the stain here, fingers crossed.
Bottle caps on a linen sleeve that is resting on a grate.
Soaking some washers and bottle caps in salt water.
The tool chest, including my ubiquitous cup of tea.
I looked for spray bottles at the dollar store but couldn’t find any so I bought these cool water cannon things.  
Way more fun to use than spray bottles.
These are Jennifer’s pieces, at least one is destined to be an apron.
Then we covered everything with a tarp.  We just need to keep it wet and hope for the best.  It should take about 24 hours to get rusted.  
Have you ever rust dyed? I’m curious to hear about people’s experiences.