Gallery
As we have new class photos, fun new show and tell ourselves, or special projects our customers bring in to share, we'll post them here!
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Bias Gradient Scarf/Cowl ...and a bit more natural dyeing!
Aug 8th
A customer brought by Show & Tell on Friday. She knit this lovely bias knit cowl using an original Silk Garden (by Noro) that grades with a long repeat thru various colors, along with a Silk Garden Solo (solid color).
It reminded me of the bias knit scarf Chris knit this spring for a store model to show off the Gradient Zauber Perlens we stock at the store - another way of using a gradient with a solid color (in the scarf we chose a skein of Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock) for a simple but really pleasing pattern.
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And although we have a Shibori Workshop planned for the weekend of Sept 23 and 24th, we don't have any more Natural Dye classes planned. But....I wanted to share a spectacular color that we got using lichen on Sunday! Our family had a summer camp on Lake Sebago Maine for generations until the generations just got too widespread and upon my moms death a few years back, the camp was gifted to a boys camp that shared the same private cove we enjoyed for almost a century! Anyway, after a rain and wind storm there, we would walk the wooded path along the point and collect mammulata lichen that had fallen off the boulders during the storm. This dye bath represents the last of the lichen we collected there and the color is magnificent, so I wanted to share.
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For those of you who do natural dyeing, you should never pick the the healthy lichen off a rock. It can take almost 40 years for them to grow and they represent a symbiotic relationship that is important to respect. But after a wind or heavy rain storm, any lichen that fall off the rocks are fair game for dyeing! The were weak/dead to begin with and that's why they couldn't hang on. Creating a dye bath from them requires lots of stirring/agitation to introduce oxygen over the course of a several month soak in ammonia!
Discharge experiments....
Aug 29th...
Since the workshop and dye tents were set up for shibori and dyeing after last weekend's workshop here, I decided to continue on with more discharge shibori samples to see if there is any interest in this technique for a class this fall.
I found these two completely black ready-to-wear garments (1 woven linen and the other a 100% cotton knit tee) on the sale rack at Marshalls so figured they were fair game!
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They discharged quite differently - the linen to a light tan and the cotton tee with a greenish cast. I removed the original shibori, reclamped/stitched and threw them in a pink dyebath.
Because I was hasty to check out the results before leaving for pickleball last night, the designs are not well thought out and the color is not as intense as I had hoped for....lesson learned: haste makes waste! Not really, since working thru them reminded me a lot about the nuances of this technique which I hadn't done in several years and I gained some new insight, as well. So as experiments go, not bad.
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Shibori Deep Dive - Show & Tell
Aug 8th
What a fun group of ladies joined me for the Shibori Deep Dive class this past weekend. And then most of them were able to come back on Monday for a "play day" to use the indigo vats and several chemical dye baths I had going, to do more of what they learned on Sat & Sun. Here is some of the show and tell. In fact, one participant came back Tuesday morning since her flight back to CA didn't leave Manchester until Tuesday night, so she and I did some additional"discharge" shibori on top of all that we did the first three days! What fun....