Ice Dye Experiments

In this facebook group I'm in we have seen a lot of ice dyeing since it's fun, easy, beginner friendly and ideal for summertime.  People have been wondering what effects temperature and therefore melt speed has on the pattern that emerges.  I had ice dyed in the summer last year and the pattern came out very much like watercolor and I also did some in the winter which came out crisper, which led me to believe that cooler melt temps would give colder looking patterns.  Boy was I wrong!  I also wanted to find out if ice size had any effect, so I crushed up some ice in our mortar/pestle.

I presoaked for an hour or so in soda ash solution, squeezed out excess water.  Crumpled onto draining trays set in drip-catching trays.  Covered in both regular and crushed ice.  Sprinkled dry dye powder on top, and set in their respective temperatures.  The one I set outside was inside a clear plastic box with lid in direct sunlight when the shade temps were around 100 F.  It melted almost completely in an hour.  The fridge temperature was apparently too cool for the ice to melt at a decent rate, and so after 4 hours, I brought it out into the house temperature, so maybe 80-85 or thereabouts, and it melted by 2 hours later.   A rinse and a soapy hot wash and hang to dry.

to melt outside

to melt in fridge

iced

iced

t=0

dyed, t=0

t=1 hour

t= 4 hours

t= 4 hours

rinse

L->R: itajime; fridge; outside; outside

The itajime is from another project and another post.  Maybe later.  Maybe if blogger's formatting didn't suck so much I would have had it done today too.

Paste Resist Experiments

For this project, I tried out different combinations of different ingredients to see which makes the best paste.  I used rice ground into powder, quinoa ground into powder and diatomaceous earth mixed with water.  For reference I also did a bit of glue resist which I know works well.

materials

drying

dyed

 Left to right:
a. 1:1 rice: water
b. 1:1:2 rice:quinoa:water
c. 1:1:1.5 rice:diatomaceous earth:water
d. 1:1:1:2 rice:diatom.:quinoa: water
e. 1:1:2 quinoa:diatom.:water
f, g: 3:1  diatom.:water (these don't really show up at all)
h, i: Elmer's clear gel glue


Ok that's all I feel like writing about on this.  It's probably all I'll ever do with it, but sometimes you just gotta test your theories.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Having done the shibori method which reveals little bubble-like rings on diapers, I had the idea that it would be cool to have a burbly line of them running down the center of a wrap.  Once I had thought of that, I was reminded of a peculiar phenomenon that happens when you're rowing an 8 and your boat is "set".  Even through the creaking of the seats, groaning of the oarlocks, and murmur of the coxswain, you can hear a line of bubbles passing right along the center of the hull.  It's magical.  The boat I most often rowed in was called Dawn Treader.  There was one time we were rowing along and I and my seatmate were just resting our oars on the water to provide balance during a drill.  I looked down into the water right as we were passing where Barton Creek pours out onto Town Lake, and true to its namesake the Dawn Treader was passing over the most amazing views, the colors were so spectacular it could have been a tropical ocean, rather than a toxic city lake.  What if I could recreate that feeling on a wrap?   I had to try.  

this is not a good example of "set", the weather sucks, and it's sloppy bladework, but this is my DT in a race

First I chopped, hemmed, washed the linen.  Then I took a spool of that synthetic twine (nylon? polyester? I'm not sure) ans tied in about a gazillion little tufts.  This is where some people tie around rocks or marbles, but I like tufts.  I wrapped the string around the neck of each tuft 2-4 times, and then secured it with a half hitch before moving on to the next tuft.  All the way down the fabric, with one long piece of string, theoretically so it is easier to untie at the end of the dye process.  Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.  I recommend wrapping your fingers in band aids or tape as soon as you notice hot spots forming.

tied

After I had gotten all the tying done, I used clear Elmer's glue gel to add in small dots for smaller bubbles.  This took a lot of patience, and I highly recommend putting something under the fabric that will not get stuck to the glue.  I glued on top of my cutting mat. I got a little trigger-happy with the glue, and consequently hae more spots than really I actually want.  Then just wait for it all to dry. 

Once my dye arrived, I mixed up colors from scratch.  On one rail, I just used straight turquoise; on the other, turquoise mixed with lemon yellow; in the center it was turquoise mixed with royal blue.  And perhaps cobalt?  Yikes, this was just yesterday and already I can't remember.  Anyway.  I also mixed up the soda ash.  I stuffed the wrap into the bottom of a big plastic tub a la LWI, and poured on the dyes.  I then waited a few minutes and poured the soda ash on top.  Once I had done this, I squished it around to make sure the dye penetrated the folds, but tried to keep it from entering the places I had applied resists.  I tipped out the excess dye/soda ash mixture (tip out the short edge of the tub to keep the dyes from muddying).  I covered with the box's lid and set in the yard for the duration of nap and a bit.  

LWI

 Then I rinsed out in the washing machine on cool just to get some of the dye out and then I untied.  My hands got very blue.  Then I washed on hot, but the glue just didn't seem to be coming out in spots.  I set it to soak in a tub of cool water til morning, then hot wash again.  Still glue.  I took it in the yard and tried to pressure spray the glue off.  No go.  So far the best thing has been just to scratch the glue out with my fingernails.  I hope it doesn't get too pilly.  Then it will be up for another hot wash just to be sure.  

closeup of resists

mostly finished

Ori Nui Shibori

Two halves to my 6 yds of linen.  Each were to become watery, but in different ways.  

For one half, I used a shibori method called ori nui to create a resist in the fabric.  Different combinations of the basic running stitch yielded different results in the end.  The parallel line of stitching actually came out the faintest.  The single line of stitching was the one I made meander most, and it came out clearly, but not particularly exciting.  The most interesting pattern was the one where I folded the fabric and stitched a running stitch about 1/2 inch from the fold, then also stitched a running stitch on the fold.  
I gathered it all up as tight as I could, dropped it in a very concentrated dyebath of cobalt blue, and let it dye for a few hours, then washed and washed and washed until the water ran clear.  Pulled the stitches out, and voila!

parallel stitching on left, center line of folded stitch on right

all gathered up

about to hit the tub

 

dyed, washed, and stitches removed

folded with center line of stitches

single running stitch

Catchup on Things from a While Back: Sandals, Doll

Wow, it's been quite a while.  I got out of the habit of posting when I was Christmas elfing, then just had a long creative break.  Well here are a few thing I've done since.  I'm sure I've made tons of other things, and done a great deal of mending-type things, but they don't have photos, so I don't know. 

Back in March, I made a pair of summery sandals for F.  They're based off the same idea as the solid winter shoes I made him, in that they wrap around and snap at the ankle to keep them securely on.  I wanted his toes and heels to still be well covered, since the ground here is so unfriendly, but I made the sides of the shoes out of strips of leather in order to allow airflow, and also have cool colors.  The artificial sinew seems to be much sturdier than my previous stitching methods, and so far so good.  The only thing I'll improve is the width of the blue straps going through the tongue, they were a wee bit too narrow and seem to be stretching a bit there, which makes the snaps not quite tight.  The way the strap threads through the tongue means they're a slight bit harder to put on a running away toddler than the winter version.
 

A while back I saw a tutorial on thebabywearer for making a Waldorf style doll.  I like their simple facial features and calm endearing looks.  So back when I ordered my dye from Dharma, I also ordered their cotton knit fabric, wool felt, and the color "chamois".  I dyed up the jersey knit, and it looked perfect on my very first try.  Which is good because I shortsightedly dyed up the whole yard all at once.  The wool felt was actually meant for another project which was too much of a failure to even think about salvaging.  So I used it as the stuffing and the fabric for the base layer (in lieu of the tubular gauze the instructions called for.)  Then I also used it as the final skin layer.  For the hair, I purchased Paton's wool yarn from my local JA, and started trying the vinegar method for dyeing protein fibers with procion dyes.  I tested a bunch of different lengths and colors, with interesting results.  I ended up using the yarn that was solid natural colored (rather than white or mixed white/natural) to give the hair a more natural and less vibrant colored hair.  The dyes I used were bright yellow and deep orange, with maybe 3/4 or 5/6 of the dye being yellow and the rest orange.  It really turned out so much better than I expected or imagined it could.  Once I finished the body and facial features, I had to wait a while to get the hair materials.  I think F might have liked it just fine without hair, but the knots and tails for the face stuck out the back.  And the skin has to be folded like a wrapped present at the top of the head.  The hair took forever, and I broke some needles before I figured out a rhythm to the thing.  But it's thick as a carpet, and I decided to leave it loopy.  If I need to, maybe one day I'll trim it.  Anyway, without further ado, F's doll:

Well, I've got tons of projects rattling around in my head, so assuming I can keep up the momentum on photos and blurbs, I'll attempt to get back to posting.

Knitted Longies

Now that we've had a shift in weather towards cooler than sweltering, I'm thinking about our warm clothes wardrobe.  And we need some longies.  Woolen pants to wear over a diaper.  Once lanolized, they are not exactly waterproof, but water doesn't get through them, since one of the coolest things about wool is the amount of water it can hold before feeling wet.  And water is the least of our worries, right, folks?

Method:
For these I started out by casting on 108 stitches using the cable cast-on method.  This is pretty much where my technicality withers into a mishmash of knowing what I'm doing and guesswork, so if you were thinking you could follow this pattern mindlessly, you can think again.  If however you don't have any interest in knitting jargon, you can go ahead and skip to the pictures.  Then I made ribbing (K2P2) for some number of rows that felt right.  Then went back to regular knitting for a while, then decided to do a row of purling on the knit side, which is how I got that thin stripe.  Then maybe 3 rows of knitting, then I started the moss or seed stitch, which is just offset purls and knits so they make a tile pattern.  Then I kept on knitting for a bit until I felt the need for more thin stripes, and continued until the length of the piece I had seemed sufficiently long.  I based this length off our current (boughten) wool soaker.  I made a gusset as shown in this pattern.  It went okay, but probably not as well as it might have if I knew what the heck I was doing.  I might have already made the rise too tall, so I cut the gusset a bit shorter than I might have.  Probably not the wisest decision.  Then I began the legs by dividing the row in half, inserting a lifeline to hold the half I wasn't currently working on, transferring the half I was working on onto double pointed needles and working in the round down to the bottom cuff, which was more K2P2 ribbing.  I cast off, went back and did the other leg.  

Things I discovered while doing this project: 
While looking up how to do a stretchy cast on and seed stitch, I found out that there are two kinds of knitting: Continental style in which the yarn leading to the ball is held taut in your left hand, and English style, in which the yarn is held taut in your right hand.  Due to the mechanics of this and how you have to switch your yarn from front to back to change between knitting and purling, ribbing goes a lot faster if you are using the Continental method, though it is less forgiving of correct tension than English.  What I found out about myself was that in my prior ignorance, I had already been doing Continental purling, and English knitting, to balance the work between my hands for their relief.  It took a while but I taught myself how to knit from the Continental side so I could do this speedy ribbing (or seed stitch).  I still switch back to English knitting if I'm doing a whole row.  Now I'm getting the hang of the Continental, and really prefer it. 


The results:
 

Knit longies.

Now I've seen them on, I am super pleased with the way they came out, and the rise height and leg length are just right.  

A trial run.

 

Winter Hat

Crocheted a winter hat for the kiddo over the past couple of days.  Worked most of it in the round, crocheting into the back loop only, then back and forth to make the back a little longer and add earflaps.  Went around the rim with a dark blue yarn to smooth off the edges and create braided ties. 

Baby Pants Alterations

An bit of a tutorial to help you alter store-bought pants to fit over cloth diapers:

You'll need: 

-baby pants.  make sure they are the length you need and have sufficient stretch in the waistband. 

-matching fabric (or not, as suits your fancy)

-scissors

-needle & thread or machine.  

Steps: 

1.   Cut down the back seam of the pants, from the crotch (is that the best word there is?) to the belt loop if there is one, or the yoke or a reasonable stopping point so long as it doesn't interfere with the waistband.  I cut on either side of the seam, removing it entirely so that I could have less bulk in my own seams.  Additionally, I cut about a half inch out of the top of the inseams. 

1.  Cut along seams at center back and inseam, like so.

2.  Carefully, put the pants on the kiddo in question.  Let him crawl and stretch and basically move in his usual way.  The biggest problem for us with these trim-looking baby pants is that over the cloth diaper they keep him from moving his legs smoothly while crawling, and they pull down the diaper.  Neither good.  So a main goal of mine for this project was smooth crawling.  Most of the area of the pants that needed expansion was in the rump, with just a bit in the crotch to make it wider. 

2, 3, 4.  Couldn't get a pic in use, but the gaping was a little like this.

3.  Look/measure/estimate at the amount of gaping that occurs while the kiddo is wearing the pants.  I got a general idea of the shape of the gape and measured it at its widest point using my finger.  If you can find your tape measure, feel free to do it the proper way.  I figured on a tiny bit of extra ease anyway, so didn't want to spend a lot of time measuring.

4.  Carefully take the pants back off again.  

5.  Cut out your second fabric to a bit larger than the hole including seam allowance.  

6.  Pin the fabric to the pants.  I found the easiest way for me was to tuck under the raw edges of the fabric, and pin it from the outside, so both right sides were showing on the outside, as if I were doing an applique.  I added a pleat going in either direction at the bottom, where the back panel joins the inseam, so that there could be sufficient expansion in that area as well. 

7.  Added fabric basted on.

7.  View of the pleat at the inseam.

7.   Sew the fabric to the pants.  I basted it on by hand for a trial run on the kiddo, with the intention of sewing it more securely by machine at a later point. 

8.  Press, if you're so inclined.  Finish seams if that makes you happy.  

This was incredibly quick as projects go, took me about an hour, and that was with me sewing by hand.  The results have been excellent--Chubber can crawl freely, and seems more comfortable wearing pants while being carried in the Ergo.  Pants that have back pockets may look a little silly, since the pockets get pushed off to the sides. 

Hope this helps someone out there in a similar pickle! 

Tangiential Crocheting

My Aunt has a cool new set of patterns out for crochet finger puppets in a sort of Halloween theme.  I have so far made the mummy and the one-eyed creature.  The mummy was super easy, and with my natural colored wool, it has a sufficiently decayed-bandage look.  I thought about leaving the tail of yarn untucked for an unravelled vibe, but could see that being chewed off in a matter of no time. You'll have to excuse her liberal lipstick application: being tightly wrapped and in a dark tomb for thousands of years, she has gotten a little out of practice.

Mummy

Bolstered by the success of my mummy wrapping, I set out to make the monster, but apparently I don't actually know how to crochet (which I don't think surprises anyone).  Anyway, my attempt at a triple crochet caused the round to increase, and I decided it looked more like a set of sepals on a fruit.  Then of course I had to make the tomato that went with the sepals.  At which point I realized the sepals looked most like they belonged to an eggplant.  Good thing I just happen to have purple yarn, huh?  I made skinnier sepals for the tomato, and an eggplant body for the original sepals. When I made the tomato I just decreased by skipping a loop, but fortunately before I made the eggplant I saw instructions for invisible decrease.  I'm not sure I did it right, because you can see a spiral along the eggplant's neck, but at least there aren't gaping holes.

Eggplant and Tomato

Then I figured out where I went awry with the triple crochet and made a better lumpy monster.  I don't have plain white and black yarn, so instead I used embroidery thread, and gave him 3 eyes to keep the scale true.  He says "hi!" for he is a friendlier monster than the mummy gal.

Bumpy Monster

 

Fall Garden

A while back, I put some sprouting potatoes in the ground.   A bit later I planted an onion which was sprouting, and then a sweet potato.  I didn't really have much hope for any of it to grow, but I figured it was that or over the wall to the compost area.  Who knows if they'll be ready before it gets too cold, but it was worth a shot.

There are also peppers growing that I started in May from seed, and tomatoes from around the same time.  Apparently the peppers wouldn't even start flowering until the weather cooled down, and it seems like the tomatoes were thinking along the same lines. 

Well, here's how it's looking today: 

Potato Buds

Sweet Potato

Tomato Flowers

Young Tomato

Peppers

Keep Tie-dye Weird

Ugh, how I hate the word.  Tie-dye.  It makes me think of hideous too-bright rainbow swirls and "Keep Austin Weird" emblazoned on an ill-fitting touristy t-shirt.  It's become so mainstream that nothing about them screams particularly weird.  Shops and even other places have assimilated the design into their cultures, and now they're everywhere you look, from football games to truck stops.

But why should I let that make me hate the word tie-dye?  I like some tie dye, and it is as succinct and accurate a description of the process as you could imagine.  You tie something up, then you dye it.  Easy.  Depending on how you tie and how much dye you use and where you put it, you can get infinite variations.  You don't have to use the rainbow swirl, you can make bunch of brown wavy pleats if you so choose.  And the process is fun.  

I've always enjoyed the process more than wearing the finished project, although way back in middle school I made a bandana with these cool dyed strings, so instead of using the strings as resist, they were making the color. At the time, wearing a headscarf was all the rage, so I wore my bandana to school alot.  I even got called to the office for my "gang symbol".  Right.  The gang of hippie tie-dyer kids.  Who regularly got smashed against lockers on our way to ACE classes, or art class, or maybe woodwind rehearsal.  There may even have been some of us in the Extreme Reading elective.  But I'm not sure, since we were merely a loosely formed band of kiddos who were concerned about whether or not we might get caught in the crossfire of a saloon brawl at lunch.  That being said, we were a huge threat to all the even titchier or even dweebier kids, mostly due to our prayers that the thugs would beat them up instead.  I still have that now-faded bandana. 

But I digress.  My point is actually how much I love dyeing things.  Resist-dyeing things.  

Yesterday, I dyed these diapers for my "more diaper mods" project.  My intention was to end up with one color on the inside of the circle and another for the background. 

  

 

My first attempt at dripping dye into the tufts created by the ties was a catastrophe.  The dye got everywhere, including my hands.  I had also tied some big tufts with rubber bands just to see.

 

The next attempt, I was trying to dye the entire thing first and then color the tufts.  It still didn't work well, so I just aimed for a more even dye all over.

For this piece, I wanted more white in the background since I could tell the blue had mixed up pretty dark.  So I crumpled up the cloth in the plastic bag it would sit in, and splashed dye over the top without worrying about getting much on the bottom.

By the time I got to the last piece I had a technique that seemed to work.  I put the green dye in a plate and dipped the tufts into it.  They were close together so it was hard to get them individually but they were also different lengths so I couldn't get them all in at once.  I had to do a couple at a time, which was more time consuming than I'd like without being as neat as I really wanted.  I then overdyed it all blue.   

I like how they all came out, these weird tie-dyes. 

More Diaper Mods

Flats are no longer doing it for me.  They are great in the early days, but getting them folded to just the right length and putting them into the cover just so, and getting it on a baby who is desperately trying to get away... I'm over it.  So my flats need a new purpose.  A diapering purpose so that I don't need to buy any more diapers.  

Initially this project was an attempt to make my flats into fitteds.  But the elastic gathering in the legs was really a hassle.  I made a lovely casing, but it was just too bulky to really snug up with elastic.  Look, it's terrible, right?  We can either blame the number of layers of fabric or the burnt-out-ness of the elastic--I salvaged it from an old, ill-fitting item of clothing.  At least I didn't waste new elastic on this endeavor.

Gathering is not occurring.

So I think I will sidle over into slightly different territory and not worry about the elasticated legs, but make this more like a contour diaper.  We'll see how that works instead.  

I may even try to make different thicknesses of diapers, (maybe somehow labelled with different colored threads to discern which is which) so that they can serve different purposes.  Another twist I'm planning is to dye the outer layer of the diaper (but not the inner) before sewing it for colorful coverless times.

Here's the prototype in the testing stage.  I already have a few modifications planned to make the fit around the legs better. 

Diaper Tabs

What do you do when you have a baby who's too rotund for size large prefolds?  Add tabs!  

For the prototype for the tabbed diapers, I used some old blue plaid flannel.  There wasn't a long enough strip to go entirely across the back of the diaper, so I split it in the middle.  Also I was being cheap thrifty and trying to use up some yellow and green thread that I have too much of.  Yeah, you can really tell this was a first attempt.

The prototype.

For the next set of tabs I opted to use 2 birdseye flats, each cut into thirds, sewn into tubes and then sewn across the top edge of the back of the diaper.  Not only is this spiffier looking, but it gives me the advantage of an extra inch or so of diaper length.  Why take measures to extend width-wise and neglect length, right?  These diapers are definitely a step up from the flannel prototype.  I decided that plain old birdseye just wasn't cool enough, so I dyed them with the Ice dyeing method.

Some of the ice-dyed tabs.

In use.

That worked out so well that I decided to dye another couple of flats to make more tabs.  For these I tried out shibori.  They kinda look like the patterns on the bottom of a pool. 

Shibori tabs.

An additional, unlooked-for advantage of these tabs is that they're considerably easier to get pins through, since they're just two layers of a looser weave.  The advantage of pins over snappis is that pins actually manage to hold the diaper on a mobile baby if you're not using a cover.  Leaving your pins stuck in a bar of soap is a good way to keep them sliding through the diaper easily.  Hmmm...that gives me an idea for another project!  

Baby Moccasins

Here's what I made yesterday.  Once I actually buckled down to do it, this project was fairly fast.  Well it took all day; it wasn't a super concentrated effort, but it all got done in one day.   Might have been even faster had I not done everything 100% by hand.  Could've saved a few minutes by machine stitching the layers of fabric together, but I decided re-threading the machine and winding the bobbin for such a small project was not worth the hassle for me.

 

Soles are of leather from Tandy's remnant pile.  They are stitched to the upper by waxed linen thread, which is, unfortunately, white, due to a serious lack of options around here..  Vamps and heel quarters are made from a double layer of brown bottomweight twill.  Green embroidery thread topstitching for some interest as well as to hold the double layer of fabric together.  Hook and loop closures on both sides of the foot for adjustability and ease of use. I had been imagining snaps, but then I imagined how hard that would be to fit and secure, so I changed my mind about snaps on shoes.

(Ignore the too-small, non-matching pants.)

I think they meet his approval.  Hopefully they'll fit for more than a week, since walking isn't quite on our agenda.  But when it is, I won't have to worry about the hot, sharp ground.  Breathe a sigh of relief.