Fun at Folly Pt. 1

It's Folly Fun time. Every so often, we (Mary and I) are very lucky to be able to go to Folly Beach which our good friend Kate who owns a beautiful home there. We go for several days and play, play, play. We all love doing these wonderful surface design techniques and try and come up with some new ideas for experimenting.

The car is packed so tight...barely room for a toothpick.

The moment we arrive, it's set up time. Mary has these wonderful mats we use to stand on and everything covered with plastic.

We had to plan what took the longest batching time to get that started first so ice dyeing it was. I've talked about the process in previous posts so will spare you the details but it is one of our favorite things to do and always with great results.

We also decided to try and use colors that we hadn't used before....just to see.

We got 4 trays done and put in the sun for batching.

On to dyeing with wood chips which our blogger friend - Robbie, sent to Mary. We were also wanting to do some eco printing which we still haven't conquered but know we will at some point.

The colors were yummy - osage orange being my favorite as it gave great color.

We used 4 different kinds of chips - this being another - Purple Heart which also yielded color but not as much.

We went out for an early morning hunt on the golf cart to find fresh leaves etc.

We soaked the fabric in alum and laid leaves on top.

We also used some raspberries and blueberries.

We used some color but mostly white fabrics.

We rolled and secured them tightly around dowels and laid them in the wood chips and alum solution.

We realized early on that the color wasn't taking real well so using a propane burner, we had the pan simmering for hours with our fabric in solution.

This is the result of the osage orange - beautiful color but no imagery of leaves...so dang, we still haven't figured out the eco printing part.

While our wood and fabric was simmering, time for more ice dyeing.

Using the screens on top of trays has made it so much easier and with better results as the ice doesn't fall through to the bottom.

We had a lot more trays going in the afternoon.

And here are our clean up cloths - mighty pretty. Part 2....coming up soon with results of ice dyeing and also some acid dyeing.