The last two weekends didn’t exactly follow my plans for crafty category domination. Aside from trying (and failing) the Cook Islands t-shirt printing, I wasn’t feeling well the weekend before last, and we spent most of Sunday relaxing at a BBQ birthday party. After some physio during the week I felt better and was keen to make some progress this last weekend, but the need to make more solar dyed scarves as gifts for my trip took precedence over other crafts. It took up two mornings, and the afternoons disappeared in domestic tasks like baking a birthday cake and gardening chores.

Well, at least I have some scarves to show you.

During the week, with the forecast predicting overcast skies and rain for ever and a day, I started to get worried I’d not get a chance to do solar dyeing again before the trip. So I tried using fabric pens on some of the silk scarves I’d bought through an online site. The pens bleed a little, so I went for a hand drawn look. The resulting scarves are very different to the others. I’m taking the cloud one, but maybe not the tape one as I made a small mistake.

Fortunately the sun did come out on the weekend. I asked Paul to pick up some paper doilies and place mats for me when he went shopping and he found quite a range.

Between them and the plastic lace, I added four more scarves to the range, with three being successful. The pattern on the burgundy one is faint because it was the last one I did, and the sky turned cloudy while it was fixing.

The fourth, a green and blue one printed using doilies, came out a little too green. My experience at silk painting back in the 90s taught me that it’s hard to sell green scarves. You have to find that one person who loves green (though when they do, they really do – hi 2paw!). Since I couldn’t guess what the colour preferences of the recipients would be, I decided to stick to more popular colours. So on the Sunday I over-dyed the back of the green-blue scarf with grey dye. It came out grey on the back and grey-green on the front.

I’d also ordered three cotton scarves along with the silk ones. They were a bit too wide for my foam mat, so I dyed the ends of this one first, then did the centre the next day. I had to apply the dye to both sides, so this one had four sessions under the sun. I’m not 100% happy with it – the middle came out too dark – so I wont be taking it with me.

The last scarf I made was an experiment, as I already had plenty of scarves to use as gifts. I used a dropper to drip dye onto the ends of a scarf.

This one is mine.

By then the sky was getting cloudy again so I packed up for the day. I have one blank silk and one blank cotton scarf left. I might try some more fabric pen ideas, but since I have plenty of scarves to use as gifts now it can wait.

While I have female recipients covered, there are the male ones to consider too. I mail ordered some pens made of Australian timbers, but for the one male recipient who ought to receive something a bit fancier and hand made I decided to weave a scarf out of this:

Except when I went to warp up the loom, I discovered I still had this on it from the convention back in early June:

There’s a bit of weaving to do before I can get back into my crafty categories challenge.