Recovering

I spent Wednesday recovering from Tuesday. I purchased a promotional show case on etsy then realized I didn’t have anything to show case. So I spent Tuesday cropping images, listing, and was up until 2am.

I did get the first dye in on four yards of fabric – organic cotton voile  (Hart Fabric) and sateen (Silk Road), and silk habotai (Dharma Trading Co.).

I have in mind a line of  voile T-shirts, with a silk lined, sateen tank top underneath. Something for the green crowd to wear on special occasions.

This is the fabric after shibori, one dye, and handpainting.

Maybe I was tired, but everything that can go wrong with the first dye did. I did a shibori circle wrap on the voile. The circles came out squared off. I dyed all three pieces at one time, chocolate brown. Or so I thought. Used a dip dye method and soaked the fabric in a soda ash solution beforehand. The voile came out a strange shade of grey. I didn’t panic. Unexpected colors are the exciting part of shibori. 

I did panic when the sateen came out a color that for lack of a better term I will call rust, and the silk was bright orange. Something way wrong with the dye method. Won’t use it again.

I kept going. I wanted to see how the “circles” would work with a handpainted swirl motif I’ve been using in  different variations and  mediums.

This is the fabric after painting metallic swirls with Lumiere. I can tell this is going to be a problem to photograph.

Next I laid out a grid.  The swirls are random, we all know that random is anything but. Repetition holds most patterns together. I used a blue violet dye, thickened with sodium alginate and added baking soda.

(Use a blender to mix the thickner. Let it sit for at least 24 hours before adding dye and soda. Then blend again using an emersion blender or hand whisk.)

I started to like the voile.

I use a bamboo steamer to set fabric. I’ve been working with a lot of silk lately and forgot how much larger cotton is when wrapped for steaming. Of course, my wrapped fabric didn’t fit and I wound up using a metal steamer with several layers of paper toweling between my wrapped fabric and the steamer.

Did I fall asleep? I don’t know. But I do know that I removed a soggy mess from the steamer. The paper towel was beautiful. My voile fabric was now gray, the unknown shade of rust, turquiose blue in some spots and a very muted shade of violet in others.

Still it looked interesting. So I hand painted the center of the “circles” with a copper colored metallic Lumiere paint.

This is the cotton sateen, including grid lines and brush bristles.

Finished, I realized this was not the piece I intended, but one I like anyway. Now the question is will this fabric in any way, shape or fashion coordinate with the sateen. The lining will definitely have to be redyed. Even I refuse to put an orange lining in a rust and purple garment.

What do you think? Tomorrow the finished cotton sateen.

My first customer!

My delightful friend Barb was my first yasmintoo.etsy.com customer. Barb purchased a scarf as a gift to give to her Aunt Eleanor in celebration of Aunt Eleanor’s 94th birthday. Here are a few images from the party.

Aunt El opening her gift.

Aunt El in her yasmintoo.etsy.com scarf and birthday hat

What a smile.

 May we  all live to celebrate our 94th birthdays in good health and strong  mind. You go Aunt El.

yasmintoo! opens on wednesday.

i’ve spent the last three months preparing to open an etsy store.  a home for experiments and artist’s proofs as I work on refining the wholesale line for yasmin sabur design. o, the store is http://yasmintoo.etsy.com.

orange and yellow shibori

so, i’ve revisited shibori and made some scarves, which tested my memory of sewing on silk. back in the day i hand rolled the hems on all of my scarves. no way, today. on the other hand i didn’t necessarily want serged hems. resolution the scarves are lined, usually two layers of 5mm habotai. makes an ethereal scarf and by passes hemming.

after the shibori scarves, i did some handpainting. ruined several yards of fabric. set the pieces in the sun and the dye ran when washed out. really ran. so i set up a steamer. deep pot, couple of stones and a bamboo steamer. wrapped the scarves gently in newsprint, put in enough water to cover the stones, set the scarf in the bamboo steamer inside the pot, put a tight cover on and steamed for 15 minutes. resolved that, next issue.

when i looked through the completed scarves, i realized that i’d had trouble with anything that i dyed in turquoise procion dye, but each color has it’s own personality.

if you build all of your colors from the primary dyes  – turquoise, fushcia and yellow, you really have to keep good dye records. this is easy to do with measuring spoons and a dye diary. eventually with enough practice, you know the percentages of each dye needed to achieve the color you want.

with the handpainting, i finally went back to adding the fixative to the dye paste as opposed to using the fabric soak method.

pink shibori with handpainting

so this is an image of a shibori piece with handpainting.  i did a few pieces combining processes. i enjoyed the shibori pieces which were wrapped and dyed two or three times, then discharged and hand painted best. i’ll show some images of them soon.

my favorite site this week is http://www.spoonflower. i’ve got everyone i know making digital fabric.

if you’re hanging out anywhere around mississippi, you might want to apply to join the Craftsmen’s Guild 0f Mississippi. the “Prepare to Qualify” Workshop is being held on August 1 in Ridgeland, MS . find more information at http://www.MSCrafts.org.

next post i’ll tell you about the block printing and may have some digital images ready that i’mturning into fabric. working in PhotoShop and Illustrator to develop my images. love that CS4 suite.

thanks  julie for her investment, barb for being my first customer and marian and leigh for just letting me work.