Category Archives: dyeing & fabric printing

A Stranglehold of Scarves

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When I started entering clothing into the Stylebook app I figured I might put in scarves, gloves and beanies eventually, but I was in no rush to. When I started, I thought I’d only use the app to put together new combinations of clothing, and I figured I didn’t need any help matching accessories to outfits – they would only be an addition to any look anyway.

But I didn’t know then how useful the app would be for getting an overview of what I own. Once I did well… I still put off tackling scarves, gloves and beanies. Why? Because they come with baggage. Well, to be honest, not the gloves and beanies. The scarves.

Gosh, did I have a lot of scarves.

Some I’d made, some were gifts and some were souvenirs. Two were given to me by a secret admirer when I was a teen (and only found out years later who sent them). Ten I’d bought on trips overseas. Nine were from my silk painting days of my twenties and, in my eyes now, are irreplaceable works of art. Ten or so I knitted or crocheted before RSI set in. Some were made from yarns spun by me and by friends. Some were made from yarn I’d bought on holidays. A few were made with luxurious, expensive yarn. A couple had been from garments I’d loved and refashioned into scarves.

More than 80 scarves in total.

How many scarves is too many? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having lots of scarves, especially when they’re handmade or have a personal story. But I’ve had this thought, itching at the back of my mind, that I didn’t actually like quite a few of mine. So lots of quick phone snaps and some photo tweaking in Stylebook followed, then sorting them into categories. One for the artistic silk-painted ones, one for keepers, one for outs.

I told myself to be ruthless but mostly I didn’t have to be. You see, I didn’t really like the scarves my mystery admirer had given to me, though I liked the guy. Some of the ones I’d bought on holidays were nasty polyester, and I have other, better souvenirs from the same trip. I usually buy more than one batch of yarn on a trip so I don’t need to keep all the objects made with all the yarn. The scarf made from my first ever handspun and another using a friend’s handspun could be frogged and unwoven and used again.

Of the scarves I’ve made… well, the rule for all handmade items applies: I tend to keep what I love, and what turns out so badly I can’t really sell or gift it. I decided the latter had to go.

I got my collection down to 50 scarves, including 5 shawls. I was hoping to halve it, but didn’t really expect to get there. I could be more ruthless, but I decided to wear every scarf once this winter and see whether any aren’t comfortable or practical. I’m also thinking of framing some of the better silk-painted ones.

What to do with the ‘out’ scarves? Well, I’m going to wash everything then do the usual round of clothing adoption prospects – friends, acquaintances, op shop – or else frog/unweave and make something new. Maybe even more scarves.

Dusk

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Back in 2010 I bought one and a half kilos of Ton of Wool cormo yarn, inspired by the locally-grown and made philosophy. RSI stopped me knitting in 2011. For a while I intended to weave the yarn, but I didn’t want anything white. Dyeing would fix that but it was expensive yarn and I’d read that it was hard to dye.

Wait long enough, and I stop being precious. I’ve already posted about the dyeing. The result certainly wasn’t consistent. But in the intervening years I’ve grown to love the look of natural dyed garments, with all their organic beauty, so I didn’t mind.

The colours remind me of the sky when you look the opposite direction to the setting sun. Purples and a touch of orange. So I’m calling the garment Dusk.

The pattern I used is “The Weekender” by Andrea Mowry. Modified to knit on the MegaBond. It was an easy conversion of a fairly simple pattern. Much faster than the Green stripes Jacket.

Sewing up had to wait until the jacket was done. In the meantime the Addi circular knitting machines arrive and I whipped up a hat to match:

When I’d finally sewed up all the seams, washed and blocked it, Dusk proved to be quite, ah, roomy:

Is there a trend for boxy oversized jumpers with skinny arms? If there is, then Dusk it rocking it. Not that I care much about being trendy. I wanted a warm, cosy jumper and that’s what I got.

And I like it.

Dyeing to Knit

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The Squares Jacket got me thinking about how I’d like some new knits in my wardrobe. Of course, I can’t hand knit any but I could drag out the Bond Sweater Machine. But did I have any yarn that would work? And patterns that wouldn’t be too hard to do on the knitting machine?

The stash presented two possibilities: either I finally get around to dyeing and knitting the 1.5 kilos of cormo yarn, or I combine smaller batches of yarn to get enough for a garment.

The cormo yarn has intimidated me since I bought it, because it is beautifully soft and therefore easy to ruin when dyeing (and I know I’ll have to dye it because I don’t want a big fluffy white garment or blanket), and I know the maker had some trouble getting it to dye evenly.

The smaller batches were a mix of frogged projects and leftover yarn. Some I’d already matched up. But once I removed anything that wasn’t machine washable I had to reconsider those matches. Some were flat colours, others were variegated from previous dye jobs.

I bought and printed a few patterns and studied them, seeing how well they’d adapt to being knit on a machine. Hand knitters tend to prefer knitting in the round these days, but increases on knitting machines are easier done on the sides, so I have to divide patterns up into smaller pieces and sew then together. The first pattern I looked at turned out to be knit from the top down with raglan sleeves, and trying to convert it did my head in so I abandoned it. I found two more that would work. One was for 10ply, so I decided the cormo would be for that. The other was for 8ply, so it would be for the mixed batch of yarns.

Then a couple of hours dyeing turned into a day of frustrated plans.

The first mistake was mixing up a batch of orange dye by accident, because the label had faded to yellow. I wanted to overdye a blue yarn with yellow to make a variegated green. So I set the orange aside and started again. Only instead of a nice green I got khaki. So I overdyed that with a blue. Which worked but left me with a much darker result than I’d intended.

The dye bath was still very blue so I tipped it into the orange and got a nice forest green. I divided it in half, diluted it and dyed the cormo in two batches. The first batch came out looking great but most of the dye rinsed out and I was left with… various intensities of orange.

So I grabbed the remnants of another blue and some magenta and black sample packs and threw them into some fresh water, divided it into quarters, and dyed the cormo again in hanks of three. It came out… a very pale patchy mauve with dark purple areas and some lingering orange bits.

Which was better. I noticed, as I squeezed out the hanks, that the water beaded off the surface of the yarn. So maybe it still has lanolin in it. Well, I don’t mind the mauve-with-orange bits result, and I don’t seem to have ruined the yarn, and the blue-green is okay, so ultimately I got what I needed.

Now for the machine knitting bit…

Wear

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While knitting garments, back when I used to knit by hand, I was probably not thinking too much about what state they’d be in after five or ten years. I was more worried about whether they’d fit properly! I realise now that I expected that, if everything else went well in the making, by creations would last a lifetime.

Not so much, it turns out.

I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how expensive the yarn was, or if it came from a high end brand. That’s no guarantee it won’t shrink or felt with wear and washing. Wear mostly. I wash my woollens very carefully. The Squares Jacket was knit from Jo Sharp yarn. Here it is now:

I can no longer blame putting on a few kilos for it not fitting well. The sleeves are about 5cm shorter. I doubt my arms got longer in the last 12 years.

Wear.

I suppose that’s the rub (no pun intended). Wear will felt wool as well as rough washing. I don’t feel like I got enough wear out of this jacket, though. I’m sad that we’re parting.

I’ve considered adding a panel at the sides and underarms, but the sleeves will still be too short. I’ve considered using the sleeves to widen the body at the sides and make it a vest but I have no yarn to finish the armhole edges and I have more than enough vests for someone who doesn’t wear them much. And the jacket really is a bit too felted. I wouldn’t give it to the op shop. I’ve considered throwing it in the machine to properly felt it then sewing something out of the felted fabric… but what?

At least it’s a natural fibre and will break down if I throw it out.

I am sad, but more than that… as my collection of handknit garments dwindles it reminds me that I can’t just get out the needles and add more. My hands, too, have suffered irreversible damage from wear.

Though I could set up the Bond and get creative will what I make just shrink and felt over the next few years anyway? If I look at the garments that are still in good shape at least I can note which yarns have stood up to wear and seek them out again. Or find the leftovers in my stash and combine them.

Which is where I headed next. Away went the sewing machine and out came the Bond Sweater Machine. And the dyepot. Stay tuned.

Fast & Not So Fabulous

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What was new and very fascinating to learn from the books and articles I read was this idea of ‘fast fashion’. It shocked me that I hadn’t noticed the huge shift in how garment retailers operate, though on reflection I had picked up on most of the signs. What I’d noticed was this:

Clothing is the same price, if not cheaper, than it was in the 80s.
Quality is more uneven and more often worse than better.
T-shirt material keeps getting thinner. Sometimes practically see-through.
Shops are having sales more often than not having sales.
Designs don’t stick around for a whole season, so if you go back for something chances are it isn’t available any more.
More clothing is made from polyester.

It turns out brands don’t release new clothes in seasons anymore. Instead they’ve shortened the time between new styles arriving in stores to weeks, even days. All three books pointed to Zara, a Spanish company, for introducing this system. They have basic full or partial garments made up in ‘greige’ somewhere like Bangladesh and air freighted closer to their distribution centre in Europe, so they can be dyed, finished and embellished according to phoned-in observations of on-the-ground trend reporters, and delivered in store in as short a time as possible.

Of course, that means that the foundation garments are essentially the same. What changes is the easy stuff like colour and embellishment. What doesn’t change that much is fabric and more dramatic cut and shape. Clothes are only in stores for a month or so before they’re removed, so it encourages shoppers to drop in regularly. And they do – two to three times more often.

Though it doesn’t seem like it would, this system reduces the amount of stock that doesn’t sell. For a fast rotation of styles to work means the clothes must be incredibly cheap. With or without it, clothing prices have been on a race to the bottom for a few decades now, and that means a generation has grown up thinking unsustainably low prices are normal, and the rest of us have assumed the old ‘high’ prices were due to brands taking a huge profit.

Interestingly, high-end fashion prices have been rising as dramatically as cheap ones have dropped. What has suffered is mid-priced, good quality fashion. Part of the reason for that is that garment manufacturers in developed countries survive by specialising in high-end product, while those in developing countries aren’t interested in the smaller order sizes that mid-priced brand require. This also means that new designers find it very hard to get a foothold in the industry.

And then there’s the fact that most shoppers can’t see the value in the more expensive garment and are confused by the fact that the same garment can cost more in a middle-sized chain simple because of the economies of scale – smaller garment manufacturing orders cost more per piece than big ones. Shoppers have lost the ability to identify quality, let alone value it. Even judging the quality of cloth by thickness is no guarantee, because additives can add a quarter of the thickness to it, only to be removed on the first wash. Most of all, having never made a garment or watched a parent or grandparent make one, young buyers don’t see the work that goes into making clothes or recognise the details that indicate good workmanship.

While fabric production and cutting can be done by machine, the making up of garments still relies on people. Large-scale production favours a system where each worker does one small task, so the training they get is only good for them getting the same king of job. Fancy design requires training or more skilled and expensive workers, so garments are designed with simple construction. This system has put countless skilled tailors out of work, in both the developed and developing world, and led to the dumbing down of fashion styling.

It raises the question: what price do you put on innovation and skill?

That’s the irony in the current way we buy clothes. It’s called ‘fast fashion’ to imply you are keeping up with on the minute trends, but it has made this era’s mainstream clothing more homogeneous and less adventurous.

Little wonder, then, that vintage and charity shopping has become so popular. Though that is facing it’s own problems… but I think that’ll have to be another post.

Dyeing To Fix Them

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Ah, those fibre craft puns…

What with all the culling I did before and after moving house, I’ve been accumulating things to over-dye for over a year now. Last Saturday I woke in the mood to do a one-off, cook-something-in-a-pot kind of craft. I wanted to try using up the candle-making supplies, but I want to try wet sand casting and I have no sand, so that’d have to wait.

So instead I cooked up some dye pots:

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First I had the Bison Scarf, which I didn’t wear because of the colour:

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I like this dusky burgundy-purple much better!

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Then there was the more recent Two Heddle Leno Scarf which was too pink for me (in the photo it is a bit less pink than in real life):

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Now a deeeeeep blue:

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Lastly I had made the mistake of spinning the water out of the Gift Yarn Jacket at the same time as something I’d dyed, leaving faint pinky-red patches:

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Overdyed with a diluted brown dye:

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I like it, but am considering refashioning it as well because the sleeves have been fulling and shrinking. (That’s why there’s a cuff missing).

With each dye bath, once the main item was out I threw in a silk scarf or scrap. They’d been solar dyed with leaves ages ago, but came out a dirty, unappealing yellow-brown. The result was surprisingly nice:

The blue one’s a keeper, I think:

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The pink one is destined for a friend who it will suit perfectly:

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I’ll need to seam the scrap of brown, but I think it’ll make a nice short scarf:

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Scarf Distraction

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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.

Printing Day

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Saturday before last was Printing Day. The projects on my to-do list weren’t the usual stamp carving, wrapping paper making kind, but the fabric printing kind, and there were just two:

Cook Islands T-shirt replica
Try solar dyeing

I decided I liked these small to-do lists that allow me to defeat a category in one day. Well, if all goes to plan…

I didn’t have a particular solar dyeing project in mind at first, but ideas soon came to me. One was to make gifts to take os. At first I wanted to print on thin cotton shawls, but I didn’t want to get stuck with lots of time-consuming hemming to do. Shawls would be bulky, too, taking up space in my suitcase. But what if I printed on silk? Silk painting was an obsession of mine back in my 20s. I knew you could buy pre-hemmed scarves. I still have some scraps of silk, so I decided to test the solar dye on one. I used a scrap of plastic lace for the stencil:

After iron to set the dye and a wash to test the colourfastness and I had this:

The lace pattern wasn’t as distinct as I’d like, but that wasn’t unexpected as the silk didn’t want to sit flat and there was a bit of a breeze stirring things. The lace pattern was rather fine, too. I figured I’d iron the scarves, pin them to rubber foam interlocking squares to stretch the fabric out a little, and cover and weigh down the stencils with a sheet of clear plastic on top.

A trip to Zart later and I had more solar dye and some pre-hemmed silk scarves. I gathered together some possible stencils and did test prints on more scraps. I tried feathers, punched out paper shapes, string, white board markers scribbled on the plastic sheet and a fan. Unfortunately, where the wet cloth touched the plastic strong blotches resulted and most of the stencils didn’t work:


I decided to try another plastic lace piece with larger holes. I was all out of scraps, so I tried a scarf:

It looked great, but the dye was shiny and sticky and even after ironing and washing it the scarf kept sticking to itself. I put it through a hot wash cycle but that didn’t fix it.

So I looked at the instruction sheet I’d picked up when I bought the first bottle of dye. It says ink is meant to be diluted 50/50 with water. But I’d read the instructions on the bottle and was sure it said the dye ‘may be diluted up to’ 50/50, so I had figured no dilution would mean a strong colour. Turns out I was right:

The next scarf I dyed I wanted a paler blue so I had diluted it anyway. I used lots of metal rings to make pale circles. By then there was enough wind that, despite weighing things down, the rings moved. I tried spritzing the scarf with more diluted dye and got more rings but less contrast.

I didn’t love with the result so I decided I’d overdye it.

By then the sun was getting too low in the sky so I packed up. I was pretty disappointed that I hadn’t finished one project on my to-do lists that weekend (the flanelette blanket fix wasn’t on any). But I figured I’d started my weekend halfway through Friday, so I could spend the next morning doing more solar dyeing… if it was sunny enough.

As it turned out, it was. I started early and I put what I’d learned to good use, deciding to stick to the lace as my stencil. I did a red scarf, another blue one, a grey one and I overdyed the rings scarf from the previous day. I had quite the process line going, ironing, washing and hanging the previous scarf while the next one ‘developed’. Here are some photos of them on the line:



Yeah, I was pretty pleased with the result. Here’s a close up of the overdyed scarf:

You can still see the rings, but the way the blue and black interacted looks fabulous. I put a lot of effort into smoothing the first three scarves when painting the dye on, but I let the grey one stay wrinkly.

However, the red dye, though diluted at 1:1, is still a teensy bit sticky. A little of the silkiness of the scarves has been lost at that ratio. The grey scarf, dyed at 1:4 dye to water has come out the softest.

So it seems that if I want to dye silk, the stronger the colour the more detrimental it is to the fibre. I should aim for a diluted effect. I don’t mind this too much – I like how the blue scarf almost looks like denim that’s had a pattern bleached into it. I’m going to get a few more silk scarves and make a few more lace print scarves. Perhaps in purple, green and brown – and see how pale a blue I can get, too.

As for the Cook Islands tshirt? Well, that turned out to be a fizzer. I tackled it the following weekend, but found the fabric ink just didn’t coat the stamps thickly enough to make a good print.

I figure it would be easier to take a photo and have it printed at Cafe Press or some similar site.

So with that project abandoned and solar dying well and truly tried out, I could declare the Printing category defeated.

Short & Sweet

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Over January I did slip in a couple of very quick crafty projects. The sort that take less than an hour. So quick I forgot to blog about them.

These bracelets, following the little tutorial over on Honestly WTF:

Then another inspired by a different tutorial at the same blog:

And then I dug out these shoes, which I vaguely remember buying while on holiday after getting blisters on my heels from the shoes I took with me. I always found them rather boring and ‘beige’.

Some acrylic paint, a leaf-shaped cutter and some address labels later, they weren’t so boring any more.

I also tried solar dyeing with flowers from our flame tree, but all they did was make the cloth slightly pinker.

I’m Dyeing Here

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Trying not to use my hands is driving me a little batty here, and it’s about to get worse. I’ve finally received the first round of editing to do on the book. There isn’t much to do and it has a deadline of the 31st January, so I’ve been able to plan 3-4 weeks of rest. It’s a minor miracle that I have the opportunity at all, so I really need to make sure I don’t spoil it, and not use my hands any more than strictly necessary.

I may go completely bonkers.

While the “Knitwear Alteration and Repair” item on my projects list is going to have to wait until February, last week I was able to fit in the “Dyeing Day”. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the crock pot working. It appears to have the wrong plug/cord, which is strange. Perhaps it got swapped accidentally on the last dyeing day organised by the knitting group I used to hang out with, but that happened years ago and I’m amazed I didn’t notice earlier.

I started with the “Circular Vest With Sleeves” from 2009:

The colour was always a problem, since I look terrible in and avoid anything too yellowy. So I overdyed with red:

I wove “The Drapey Scarf” back in 2008 out of some $1 balls of yarn I bought at Dimmeys that has a percentage of cashmere in it so small that it only counts on a psychological level. I knit a top out of it that, despite being knit very loosely, shrank to about 3/4 it’s original size and I recently felted it to make a vest. But it does weave up beautifully.

I dyed it purple, with a dip-dye method to get an ‘ombre’ effect:

Finally, I dyed a scarf woven from undyed handspun leftover from a big charity scarf weaving binge in 2009.

It went straight into the purple dye bath and came out much improved, and still gloriously soft.

A few nights ago I tried weaving on the knitters loom while watching tv. It only gave me a little flash of heat in my wrist – much less than typing this blog post does. Perhaps if I start to go a little mad from lack of creative activity, I’ll do just a little bit of weaving. While wearing my wrist brace, to make sure.