Folly Fun - pt. 1

So time for another Folly retreat with Kate and Mary - great fun! It's always a whirlwind packing and planning and deciding what to do...this time it's something we haven't played with very much - Indigo, wax and shibori along with some eco printing using some techniques we learned in a recent workshop - Wow, that's a lot to pack into 3 days.

My cat Fraggle wants to come and thinks he can hide in my tiny suitcase...Ha! He can barely fit..

Well, fast forward 5 hours and we are now at Kates beautiful place overlooking the water and getting ready to dive in (not the water,...... but our shibori). We had lots to use as resists including curlers, rubber bands, clamps, plexiglass, marbles and lima beans...Are you curious yet?

We used some new PFD mercerized cotton as well as silk and some "mistakes" we wanted to overdye. My husband had cut plexiglass into small rectangles we used to make a "sandwich with fabric folded in between and clamped tight (left). The piece on the right was rolled into a long snake, rubber banded and twisted.

This piece had been lightly rusted. I then used corks cut in half to tie into little bundles....I always knew that drinking wine would pay off someday.!

And old fashioned rollers...I wonder if anyone even uses these anymore.

After clamping with rollers, the fabric was bunched into a tighter bundle and held in place with rubber bands.

Another piece just squished and held with rubber bands...quick and easy.

The pot of Indigo ready to take our fabric. It's a very fast process with great results.

The first piece sandwiched between plexiglass becomes window panes.

Some more pieces hanging to dry including my rusted and indigo t shirt.

I had a piece of charmeuse silk I wanted to try wrapping around a pole. It was a fairly large piece and hard to manipulate.

I used a large PVC pipe and string which was wound around the silk and then scrunched up.

Our pot of indigo was not deep enough to accomodate the length of fabric so we had to gently pour the dye over the fabric at the top of the pipe.  It's important not to incorporate too much oxygen back into the  pot; it will weaken the indigo....Using slow and gentle movements helps. After it was in the pot (@ 10 mins) it was removed and laid on grass to watch it turn from a yellowish green to indigo.

And the results.

I used to teach a workshop in fabric dyeing and had made lots of samples....one of the techniques I taught was 3 color dyeing and this red, orange and yellow was pretty but quite bright.

I used screws as you might be able to tell in photo above this one, and wrapped the entire length of the screw with rubberbands.....creates a flower. The smaller rings (with not as much red showing) were created by wrapping marbles.

And more results and lots more to come so please come back and visit.