This was significant to me for a few reasons.  It was late March, and we’ve had a very mild winter.  The only other frozen precipitation we have had this winter was some freezing fog and one wet snow followed very quickly the next morning by several inches of freezing rain, creating sheets of ice.

I have seen blog posts about snow dyeing for the past few years and have wanted very much to try it.  Last winter, our only snow came around Thanksgiving, when I was busy with family plans and the holiday.  I assumed there would be more snow later for snow dyeing if we were already getting it so early, so I didn’t take the time then to try it.  We had no more snow last winter.  We’ve had no more this winter, either- sheets of ice just wouldn’t work.  I had decided that it probably wasn’t going to happen this year, and I could just push it once again to the back of mind and hope for snow next year.

Also, another part of this story is that my youngest sister, just 37 years old, passed away very unexpectedly this past Saturday.  Karissa adored snow and was as excited as a young child whenever there was any.

When I saw the snow this morning, it felt like it was connected to Karissa somehow- a gift from her.  I realized immediately that it looked like snow that would work well for snow dyeing, although I also knew that it was going to be warming up quickly, so I would need to get started right away.  It seemed like a lesson about that, too:  don’t put off anything meaningful that you can do today.  I have some regrets about things I’d put off with Karissa.  She had asked me to knit her a pink hat and we’d chosen a pattern and yarn and I hadn’t gotten to it yet.  I thought there would be more time, but there wasn’t.  I felt like the unexpected snow this morning was her saying that it was okay, that she understood, and she was giving me a gift of something she loved that she also knew somehow I had been wanting.  She gave me a beautiful scene to wake up to and  an opportunity, but I had to take it right now, so a reminder to try to do that, too.

So- I worked quickly.  I took the dog out and then started soaking some fabric in soda ash solution while I grabbed a quick bite to eat.  I then mixed up some dye, using Fuchsia, Golden Yellow, and Strong Navy (all from  Dharma Trading).

I didn’t bother with folding any patterns, but just sort of scrunched the fabric up on screens suspended over basins to catch the drips.  Everything was starting to drip outside, so I knew I didn’t have much time and just kept everything simple:

I then filled up a bowl with snow and piled it on top of the fabric:

When there seemed to be enough, I poured on the dye colors randomly.  It sort of looked like a giant snow cone pile to me:

I let it sit outside for a couple of hours, and as the temperature rose, the snow started to melt and drip through.  I brought it inside to let it finish melting.  When the snow had all melted, I wrapped it in plastic and let it batch on top of my warm clothes dryer.  I don’t know if I needed to do that, since I have seen instructions where there doesn’t seem to be a warm batching time, but I decided to do it anyway since I knew it couldn’t hurt anything.  I then left it overnight. This morning, I rinsed it and ran it through the wash with synthropol as I usually do.  This is my final result, which I love:

Here are some closeups of a few of the sections which show a little more of the detail:

I loved getting to try this and I will always think that this opportunity was a gift from sister.

I have experimented with different dye resists in the past, but it’s been awhile.  Last week, I read an article that mentioned in passing using rice baby cereal as a dye resist.  Although it didn’t include instructions, it made me want to experiment and see how it would work.

The first thing I needed was rice baby cereal.  I didn’t have any and could have gone to the store to get some, but I like to use what I have on hand.  I googled “how to make rice baby cereal,” and came up with a pretty simple process.  Basically, just buzz some rice in your blender to turn it into a powder and then add water and cook it.  I only had brown rice since that’s mostly what we eat.  I didn’t know if it would work as well for this, but I decided to try it.

My powdered rice in the blender:

I then had to decide how much water to add.  I started with 1/4 cup of rice powder and 1 cup of water.  I brought it to a boil and then reduced to a simmer, stirring it with a whisk.  I ended up adding more water until I’d used 2 cups and it looked about right to me. I cooked it for probably ten minutes, total. This is, of course, completely subjective:

I then put it into a squeeze bottle and applied it to my fabric, which is just plain white cotton.  A few pictures:

The next part was actually the hardest.  It took only a few minutes to squeeze on the rice paste, but it took two days for it to dry completely.  I’m sure this would be faster if it was not cold, foggy winter in a house where we don’t turn the heat up  very high.

When the rice was finally dry, I mixed up some dye (procion mx that I get from Dharma Trading, along with most of my basic dye supplies).  I thickened it with alginate and also added some soda ash solution, since I didn’t use fabric that I had pre-treated with soda ash.  I mixed up just enough to use in a short time, since with the soda ash added, there is a pretty short working time.  I usually try to use it all within an hour, if not less when I work this way.  A picture:

I used a sponge brush to paint this on to the fabric.  Since this was very experimental, I used just two colors, fuchsia and sky blue, and sort of just mixed them as I went:

Next, I had to batch them somewhere warm.  I often use a heating pad to batch in the winter, because for sure my house is not going to ever be above 75 degrees in February, and dye needs at least that temperature.  I realized that it was pretty warm on top of the dryer in my laundry room, so I decided to try batching them there, making sure to keep laundry going to keep the dryer running, which was also good for my laundry :).  I covered everything in plastic and left it alone overnight:

The next day, I rinsed everything out quickly in warm water.  I wasn’t sure if the rice resist would all just wash out, or what- as I said, I had no instructions for this :).  It seemed to peel off pretty easily, and I found that it could be removed very easily by running the edge of a spatula over it, so I did that:

I then did my usual cold rinse and then a hot wash in the washing machine.  My final results:

I am happy to say that my experiment worked and was fun.  I know I will be doing more in the future.  It actually took only a very short amount of time, although that time was spread out over several days, so it isn’t an instant gratification sort of project.  I have some new ideas to try with this soon.

When I started making this set, there was snow, freezing rain, and ice.  As I finished them up, that was gone.  Yesterday it was back to the low 60′s, not really hat and mittens weather.  I’m pretty sure that we will still have at least one more blast of winter that will allow me to wear them.  If not, I’m all ready for next year…

Some details about these:

Both are made of Chroma yarn from Knitpicks.  I had never used it before and love the softness, the slight fuzziness, and the patterning of the colors.  This colorway is called U-pick, which I think is either discontinued or will be shortly.  There are still lots of other great colorways, but I liked this one because I thought it would go with both my purple coat and my brown one.  I used worsted weight for the mittens and fingering weight for the hat.

I made the mittens first:

These are from a really basic, simple pattern that I’ve had forever from Cottage Creations (they don’t  have a website, but  a lot of yarn stores seem to sell them- I love and have used many of their patterns).  These are from their “Projects for Community Knitting” booklet.  The ribbed cuff continues up into the thumb and they were really easy and are very comfortable to wear.

I then moved on to the hat:

I fell in love with this hat when I first saw it.  It is from Tangled, a web magazine dedicated to those who like to both knit and crochet.  Some of their patterns are for sale, and others like this one for the Tessellations Hat are free.  They always have a lot of fun designs.  I found this one through their blog, which can be found here or from their main web page.

I absolutely loved crocheting this.  I adore granny squares and double crocheting is my very favorite thing to do- there is a rhythm to it that isn’t there for me in any other stitch.  It may be weird to have a favorite stitch, but there it is.  I also love the way this pattern takes advantage of the slow color changes in the yarn.   Sewing it up was even fun and it was quicker to make than I thought it would be.  It’s probably sort of an eccentric hat, too, which I also like :).

This is the first project I’ve completed in 2012.  It probably shouldn’t really count, as it was meant to be a Christmas gift.  As I didn’t start it until December 23rd, I knew it probably wouldn’t actually get finished until the quieter days of  January.  I gave it away yesterday, so now I can post the picture of it:

It’s a simple hat from one of the independent patterns at Knitpicks (found here:    http://www.knitpicks.com/patterns/Braided_Cable_Hat__D10570220.html )

I loved the construction- the cable band was knit first, and then stitches were picked up for the rest of the hat.  I’ve been mostly crocheting lately, so it was fun to knit something again and remind myself that I can still do that :).

First, I made several packing tape transfers- check out my previous post linked above for the details.  I then pulled out my big box of hand-dyed fabric scraps left over from previous projects, dye experiments, etc., and tried to match them up with the transfers that I had.  I decided to go with a size of 4-1/2″ by 6″ and cut out what would become my base, some stiff interfacing.  I used non-fusible Peltex because that’s what I had ( I challenged myself to use only materials I already had in the house for this project):

I then cut out the fabric for the front and back of each postcard as well as a small piece of off-white muslin that I decided to use as a frame for each transfer.  Because each transfer varied in size, I hand-cut this.  Here’s a stack of all of the materials for one postcard: address-side fabric, Peltex, front fabric, muslin and packing tape transfer:

After cutting everything out, my first step was to use a couple of strips of Heat and Bond to adhere the main fabric to the Peltex.  This might have been a good place to use fusible Peltex or even full sheets of Steam-a-Seam or Misty Fuse, but once, again, I was determined to use just what I had on hand:

I repeated this with the rectangle of muslin, which I placed by eye.  I like general symmetry, but I don’t like it to be too perfect, so I don’t really measure most things like this:

I then placed the transfer on top:

For some reason, I forgot to take pictures of the next step, but it’s easy to explain.  I sewed around the packing tape transfer through all of the layers using a small-ish zig zag stitch.  I then switched thread colors to add a bit more depth and sewed around the outside of the muslin with a zig zag stitch.

At this point, I wrote  the addresses on my postcard backing fabric.  I wanted to do this before I sewed it all together so that if I made a mistake, I wouldn’t have to take the whole postcard apart to fix it.  In the past, I’ve also made fabric address labels that I ironed on after the postcard is all sewn together, but I didn’t want to do that this time. Once again, I ironed a couple of strips of Heat and Bond onto the postcard base.  Before doing this, I put down a piece of parchment paper so that there would be no chance of having the packing tape transfer melt or stick to my ironing board cover.  I don’t know if it would have really been a problem, but I didn’t want to take a chance.

I then sewed around the entire postcard with a wider zig zag stitch.  Here’s a close-up of one with all stitching finished:

A picture of all of the postcard reverse sides:

Here are a few pictures of the postcards a little closer-up:

These were really fun to make and now I just need to get some stamps to get them in the mail in the next day or two.   I’ve also been enjoying looking at all of the links showing the creativity of some of the other people participating in this swap. Check out the link to ihanna’s blog at the top of this post  to see the blogs of other swappers and a flickr pool of some of the images- lovely eye candy to me!

The materials:

Packing tape and magazines

I read in a few places that you should use pages from good quality magazines, but I’m not really sure what that means.  Some that were very glossy that I would have thought were high quality didn’t do as well as some that were more matte made out of recycled paper. I also successfully made one out of a cartoon on very low quality newsprint and another from an image on my power bill.  All I can really recommend is to experiment and see what happens.  You really won’t be out much if an image fails.

First, find an image you like and cover it with packing tape.  This image is from an ad in Mary Jane’s Farm magazine, which happens to make very nice transfers.  The packing tape is just regular old packing tape available everywhere.  I’ve used two different brands and both worked fine.

Next, trim the paper to match the tape and smooth down really well.  I use a combination of pressing with my fingers and also passing over it a couple of times with my grocery store club card:

Next, put the images in a dish of water.  I read all different lengths of time, from 15 minutes to an hour.  I usually leave them soaking for half  an hour or so.

The next step is my favorite part.  Gently rub off the paper from the back.  I usually do this one time and then soak it in fresh water and go over it one more time.  Some papers almost dissolve and others take a bit more work.

And finished- You can see how translucent the finished image is.

I usually give them one final rinse and then allow them to dry spread out on a dish towel.  Sometimes when they are dry there may still be little bits of paper and sometimes I re-soak them and other times I leave it as it doesn’t seem to make that much difference.  Sometimes there is still just a bit of stickiness on the transfers, so I store them in a single layer and then roll them up in wax paper.

Here is a recent batch:

These can now be used in a variety of ways- glue them to paper, use them in scrapbooks, cover a journal with them, or as my current plan is, sew them to something else.  I’m participating in a postcard exchange and plan to layer these with some of my hand-dyed fabrics and stitch them all together.  I made a sample out of a transfer I didn’t particularly love to make sure it would work.  In this sample, I sewed the transfer to a piece of muslin that I’d bonded to a piece of heavy interfacing (Peltex).

If I like my final results and end up going with this for the postcard exchange (organized by ihanna’s lovely blog), I’ll post them here.  And if I go a completely different way for my postcards, I’ll post that here, too :).

A couple of weeks ago, there was a prediction that we would have some significant snow within the following week.  I was looking forward to that because I wanted to try snow dyeing.  We had a decent amount of snow in November, but at that time I was too busy with holidays and activities to pull out all of my dye supplies.  As the approaching storm got closer, the predicted temperatures got warmer and warmer and in the end all we had was rain.  Still, I felt like playing with dye, so I turned to my old favorite, stitched-resist shibori.  I decided to make hearts, which I plan to use in some future projects.  They are really quick and simple to stitch up.

To start, I cut a heart shape out of an old bill to use as my pattern.  It’s close to  3 inches x 3 inches in size:

Next, I folded my fabric in half and traced around the heart.  I like to use Crayola’s washable markers- I’ve never had a problem with them washing out of my cotton fabrics.  I then drew two more hearts freehand.

I then threaded my needle with a double strand of Dual Duty Button and Carpet thread.  It’s a little heavier and sturdier than many other threads and is also easy to find in chain fabric stores.  I stitched a simple running stitch over each of the lines I’d drawn.  I knotted the beginning of the stitching of each row, leaving the other ends loose for now.  Here’s the side with the lines:

Here’s the other side, which shows the stitching a little better.  I don’t particularly try to be even with the stitches:

Next, I pulled all the stitches tight and knotted the doubled ends together that had been left loose:

I then dyed the fabrics.  After dyeing, I usually give them a cold rinse and soak and then carefully clip and remove the threads before giving them a final washout of the excess dye- and yes, my fingers are still faintly purple from this today.

I used three different fabrics for this batch of hearts. Some was dyed golden yellow (and over-dyed fuchsia red), some was left white (dyed with blue-violet), and some was multi-colored (over-dyed with strong navy).  All of the dyes I use are fiber reactive procion dyes from Dharma Trading.

Original fabrics:

Finished hearts, ready to use for appliques, to be further embellished and/or pieced into other projects:

I love making snowflakes just for the joy of doing it.  I love folding up some paper, randomly cutting and then opening it up to see my results.  I don’t think one is ever too old for it, or if so that age must come later than 45, because I’m still enjoying it.

I’ve been enjoying seeing posts around the internet lately about patterns for snowflakes and different fold options for snowflakes.  I saw a post a few days ago about folding 5-fold snowflakes which reminded me about some word snowflakes I’d made in the past.  I actually first saw these several years back when a work-study student in my husband’s office made them with the names of all of the people in the department and hung them up as winter decorations.  I’ve been playing around with making snowflakes with coffee filters for the past few days, so decided to combine both ideas to make these.

First, here is a link to a pdf illustrating folding square paper into a 5 pointed star:

http://www.jessicajonesdesign.com/downloads/five_point_snowflake.pdf

I’ll  show my version using a round coffee filter below, but the link above may be helpful  if starting with square paper.

I used these coffee filters because I had a bunch of them in my cupboard left over from a previous project.  I found that it’s helpful to give them a quick once-over with an iron to flatten them out a bit.  I was able to flatten several at a time and it made them much easier to work with.

First, fold coffee filter in half:

Then fold it in half again:

Now open up that last fold.  Take the right-hand side and fold it up to the middle:

Open it up again.  The creases should look like this:

The next step is easy to do, but harder to show and explain.  Fold the crease that was just made to meet the center crease.  Open it up and it should look like this:

Now fold the right- hand edge up to meet the last crease made:

Next, fold the left-hand side over to meet the new right-hand edge:

Now fold  this in half:

Now, this can be cut in any way you choose.  Here’s a traditionally cut snowflake from one of my coffee filters:

For cutting words into the snowflake, here are my next steps.  First, I took my folded triangle and traced it several times onto a piece of paper:

I then started experimenting with drawing words and letters.  Here is my sketch for “joy”:

My drawing skills aren’t amazing, but that doesn’t really matter for this.  I just try  to be careful to keep my shapes simple enough to cut easily and also to keep everything connected.  At least a little bit of the edge on both sides of the triangle needs to remain intact, just as for any snowflake cutting.

When I was happy with my design, I cut out the triangle from the scrap paper.  I slipped this inside the top layer of my folded snowflake (and a note- I had to trim off a little tiny bit from both sides of my pattern to slip it inside) so that I could see it to trace my design:

I then traced it:

Then cut it out.  A hole punch can help to start cuts in inside areas:

All cut out:

And finished!

These can be flattened a bit with a book or pressed with an iron.  Here’s another one I made with the word “peace”:

I love that at first glance, these just look like any other snowflake, but when looking closer, the word shows up.

I’m off to make some more!

I’ve recently been interested in learning more about weaving, and last month my mom helped  that interest along by giving me a rigid heddle weaving loom as a birthday gift.  I’ve enjoyed making a few little sample things, figuring out how to warp it without looking back at the instructions and generally just getting comfortable and familiar with it.  I decided it was time to make an actual project, but limited myself to what I had here.  Since I also knit and crochet, there does tend to be plenty of yarn around here already :).

I had previously only tried working in plain weave, and wanted to try something new.  I found a youtube video showing how to do  a pattern called Brooks Bouquet and decided I wanted to try it.  It’s here if you’d like to see it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeucN2Ge4x4

The yarn I used was from a cone of some hemp-wool blend that I have had around for awhile.  I started out with 6 rows of plain weave and then began the Brooks Bouquet pattern.  I repeated the pattern 10 times then wove 3 inches of plain weave for the bottom of the bag, then ten more repeats of Brooks Bouquet, ending with 6 more plain rows.  Here’s a picture of it in progress on the loom:

After taking it off the loom, I finished both ends with a couple of rows of zig-zag stitching on my sewing machine.

I then made the long strap that became the sides and handle as a 3-inch wide strip of plain weave.  I hemmed it on the sewing machine, as well:

I hand-sewed the edge the strap to the body of the bag.  I left the very top part of the bag un-sewn and left the sewing yarn there to finish stitching up after adding the lining:

I then started working on the lining.  I was given some really nice wool wool fabric that was sort of a gray color.  I over-dyed it deep orange.  Here’s a picture of the before and after:

To create the lining, I measured across the bag:

I added two inches for seam allowances and added several inches to the height:

I then pulled up the bottom corners and measured  a triangle that was 3 inches across (my strap/bottom width) up the side edge.  I sewed across this triangle and trimmed the corners:

I inserted the lining into the bag and hand-tacked the bottom corners.  I then folded the  lining over the top edge and carefully pinned it to make sure I was catching all of it as I sewed.  I machine stitched all around the top 3/4″ down.  I then pulled that fabric back over itself to the inside of the bag and pinned it down well.  I machine stitched this from the front side of the bag very close to the lining through all of the layers- sort of the stitch-in-the-ditch thing often used in quilting.  I didn’t take pictures of that part, so I hope this sort of makes sense :).

When finishing the top, I also sewed in a crocheted loop to serve as a button hole.  I finished hand-stitching up the last bit of the sides, sewed on a hand-made button and here is the finished bag:

I think that the finishing part took at least as long- maybe even longer- than the weaving part :).

I always enjoy reading about various textile arts of the past and in this issue, I was especially taken by the article about weaving on mini 4-inch looms, originally called Weave-Its.  The article said that these had also been produced under the name Weavette, but that they were no longer made and could now be found on Ebay, in antique shops, or at garage sales.

It was shipped very quickly and arrived at my house last Thursday.  I played with it a bit on Thursday night.  I’ve never really done much in the way of weaving, and I messed up the warping of my first square.  I then successfully made one square and proceeded to mess up my third.  By that point, I had finally figured out how everything is supposed to look when it’s right and when it’s wrong and have been successful with all of my later squares.  I found it to not be difficult once I finally had the warping part figured out.

On Friday morning, I started to take pictures of my first four successful squares.

I was going to write a blog post about it and planned to write that while it was sort of fun, I didn’t really anticipate making any huge projects this way.  I’d found some pdfs of vintage project books at

http://www.eloomanation.com/ that had initially looked fun, but that I now knew I’d never really create enough squares to make any of them.

The next few days were long, tiring and are sort of a blur now.  My husband had very successful surgery and I spent a lot of time sitting in the hospital.  I was very, very thankful to have that mini-loom with me. I found that it was the perfect thing to work with to keep my hands busy. It required no counting or following patterns as knitting or crocheting would have.  There are no stitches to get pulled out in my bag and it could be put down at any second as I helped adjust a pillow, talked to a physical therapist, or whatever.  I could work quickly and make a whole square or just weave a slow row or two when I was tired and distracted.

Now my husband is home from the hospital to continue the work of healing.  I’m finding that my loom is still the perfect outlet for me, as I sit near him on the couch or bed, being close to help if needed, but not distracting to him.  Weaving little squares is possible when tired in a way that other hand-work just isn’t working for me right now.  I anticipate my little loom being a continuing companion as we head to doctor’s appointments and physical therapy visits in the coming weeks.