A busy week in March

I knew this was going to be a busy week with Kreative Momentum workshop on snow dyeing, teaching English, Felt workshop with Marjolein Dallinga, and then teaching my own workshop on disperse dyes and finally Friday's cross-country skiing in West Bragg Creek to finish (me) off.

The snow dye workshop was successful. 

We did the dyeing on Monday and met up on Thursday to share out the basins' goodies.  I had orange and yellow (turned out to be more orange than yellow) and the violet became blue with a hint of violet.  All my fabrics went under the snow with out dampening.  I think this made the colour pick-up stronger.  I saw that my sail-cloth fabric took the dye very well (bottom right).  Pure colours didn't give as good an effect, this was as expected.

I had kept the left-over dyes in their pots at room temperature for 3 days, but I used them up on more sail-cloth just to see how well they worked with mixing of colours. I was really pleased with the results.  Some areas are really very interesting and these fabrics will form good grounds for more stitching and samples.  Sail - cloth is quite stiff though, but will be great for machine embroidery.

Instead of using inclined plastic sheeting as suggested in Quilting Arts magazine, I used pieces of fabric - muslin=cheesecloth (canadian English) taped to the bowl and forming a surface on which to place the fabric and drain away the snow/dye mix.  The advantage is that the muslin is dyed at the same time...

I have just found this tutorial from Rebecca J Kemble who wrote the article in QA. if you would like to take a look

These are the results of the Felting workshop with Marjolein.  Where we learnt to felt with very little wool roving.  A 12" square was laid out using only 10g of roving and felted down by 50% to create a very sturdy piece of fabric.  On the right you see one legwarmer!  which used 30g of roving and was fun and thrilling to make.  I would have been happier to learn more techniques of 3D surfaces but we only had one day...  and M. did well to cope with the mixed-ability group.

Important outcome - Kiss your Face olive oil soap (used for felting all day long)  is wonderful... especially for my skin in this dehydrating atmosphere of Calgary.  Recommended.

Next stop during the week was a workshop with Kreative Momentum where we looked into disperse dyes. And created lots of interesting surfaces with so much potential that we are going to carry on with this at the next workshop... I had better start preparing some more progressive samples....