Archive for the 'Dyeworks' Category
I did say I was itching to get stuck back into the dyes, didn’t I?! Funny how when I get something into my head, the priorities list has a way of rewriting itself! Last night I dyed a few pieces of 100% wool felt. It’s the first time I’ve done this – I’ve been meaning to try it for an age, but was finally spurred on when I saw a) the lovely hand-dyed felt Trudi has been creating, and b) the deliciousness out at Winterwood. Winterwood is where I picked up my base felt – it is so soft and lovely, and it thickens up a bit more in the dyeing process. The trick is getting it not to thicken up too much – I was scared to poke and prod too much once it was wet, and as a result there is a bit more mottling than I was after in two of the pieces. Now I’m a bit more familiar with the process, I’m sure the next time will be a bit easier.
Combined with a little bit of car-crafting from Monday (doesn’t this make a lovely knob-cozy for my stereo?)…
…I think you can tell what I’ll be making more of today 
Visit some more creative spaces via Kirsty.
Oh, and also Speaking of Colour, it has recently been brought to my attention (when I switched to using the family Mac, with it’s whizzbang monitor, instead of my less whizzbang laptop) that on some screens, my blog and all my photographs look a bit… crap! So if you have one of those screens, I’m really sorry. It would appear I’ve been blasting your eyeballs with oversaturated colour for the past however-long-you-have-been-reading 
For what it’s worth, the background felt in the above pictures should be a lovely creamy colour, not the light yellow it appears on my screen currently (of course, the problem could lie with the whizzbang screen I suppose!)
April 22 2010 | Dyeworks and Memes and Other Craft and Yarncraft | 7 Comments »
Look at all that lovely de-lurking down there! Thank you for all the kind comments on my birthday post. (Only one ‘You’re Ace’ though. Hmmmm.) I’m delighted to announce that the ten pretty flossies will be making their way to Valerie any day now.
I was going to give you photographic evidence of the name-draw as carried out by my barrel boy, Finn – but Melbourne winter evening + poor kitchen lighting did not permit. Besides – see above. It looked kind of like that! You’re just going to have to take my word for it
Valerie, if you would be so kind as to send me your details, I’ll have the floss off in the mail to you ASAP.
Oh, by the way, if anyone else is interested in what happened to my floss dyeing tutorial (I had an email a little while back about this), I do plan on getting it back up at some point – hopefully with accompanying photographs. In the meanwhile, I have the text of it available as a PDF, so just email me if you’re interested in doing some dyeing of your own!
June 01 2008 | Dyeworks and General Ramblings and Other Craft | 3 Comments »
… the blog turns three today!!!
By some odd chance of fate (the strangest coincidences keep happening to me lately – something in the air?), this lovely lady asked me yesterday how long I had been blogging. It occurred to me later that my ‘bloggiversary’ (cripes I hate that word!) must be sometime around now, and lo and behold, May 28 is it. Yep, I’ve been rabbiting on for lo these 36 months now. So Happy Birthday blog!
Now like all good crafty bloggers, I’m giving the birthday gifty to you Readers-slash-commenters bring the life to a blog, and I am so grateful to those of you who have hung around, especially over the last angst-ridden, sparsely-updated twelve months or so. Niamh and I have assembled this pretty little palette of Sugarlemon hand-dyed embroidery floss. All you need to do is delurk, tell me I’m Ace (or not!), and one random person scoops the lot.
Also, we made Birthday Scroggin. I can’t guarantee there’ll be any of that left when the time comes to send off the floss though 
(Actually, the Scroggin has nothing to do with the bloggiversary, but it is very festive, don’t you think? Inspired by an old Kiddley post. Yum).
(Oh yes, and smilies still not fixed. Gosh I’m lazy!)
May 28 2008 | Blog Blather and Dyeworks and Other Craft | 17 Comments »
Well. Our Easter break was… slightly more than we bargained for, since our car ended up in parts in my father-in-law’s front paddock for several days!
When we arrived on Thursday afternoon, we had planned to do a fairly simple strut replacement job before heading off camping. As soon as FIL got a look at the underneath of the car, it rapidly turned into a drive-shaft-rebuild-needed-asap job. One of the drive shafts turned out to be a bugger to detach, so we weren’t able to get them into the rebuild place before everything shutting down for the long weekend. Nevermind… we loaded our considerable cargo into a trailer and FIL’s car, and took off from Friday through Monday for a lovely few days of riverfront camping.
On Tuesday morning, we had the drive shafts rebuilt, then FIL and OtherHalf spent the afternoon getting the car back in working order. And here we are, back again. Chocolate-bloated and laden with half a ton (it seems) of dirty laundry, but back.
Here then, are some promised catch up pictures. First, the two pay-it-forward packages I didn’t show you earlier:
For Angi
For Debbi
Next, the final UFO that I stitched on for the round robin. This is Tracey’s Royal Holiday. It was nice to finish on another Mirabilia design:
Before:
And after:
And that, boys and girls, marks the end of so-called ‘obligation‘ stitching for me. For the time being, anyway. I joined this round robin because I knew I would go through a bit of a stitching slump while Niamh was little, and I figured this would be a good way to spur me into doing a little bit, better than nothing at all. But I have to confess, I’m not sad to see then end of it. I was growing a bit resentful of the time spent stitching on other people’s work (though I will no doubt feel differently once my own UFO gets home, and I see first-hand how much has been worked on it). Each time as the deadline approached, I felt pressured to stitch, even though I didn’t necessarily feel like doing so. I have done very little other stitching for the whole year so far – I completed the Hardanger exchange, I’ve spent a couple of hours on Lilly, and just in this last week I’ve come very close to a finish on one of my smaller pieces (hopefully I’ll dance this weekend). But that’s all. So I’ve decided to opt out of any more exchanges or round robins for at least the rest of 2007. How much or how little stitching I will actually do, I can’t predict, but I just don’t want to feel the pressure of deadlines for a little while.
April 12 2007 | Counted Stitchwork and Dyeworks and In Progress and Other Craft | 5 Comments »
Far overdue, may I show you in full the hardanger exchange which I stitched for Jenny. You can see it hanging on the wall in her post – here’s a slightly different angle for interest:
Or, you can get up close and personal with the stitching here. Although I thought finishing it as a ‘wall ornament’ was kind of uninspired (hey, I was really tired!), I was really happy with the quality of my finishing. I have a bag (or, um, three) of finished-but-not-finished projects which I’d really like to start making a dent in – Anne and Karen have started up the Focus on Finishing blog, have you seen it? That should provide me with some inspiration.
The reason I’ve taken so long to post this is because my ‘spare’ time (insert maniacal laugh here) has been taken up with Suz’s UFO for the Round Robin. She sent around Black Swan’s Lily Pond Dreams. Confetti stitching ahoy! It kicked my butt, and once again I didn’t achieve as much as I would have liked. Here are the before ‘n’ afters, clickable for biggering.
And, just in case you aren’t all pictured out, here are pics of the three pay-it-forward packages that I know have arrived. (Should check up on the other two – Angi, Debbi, are yours there yet?). I dyed a fat 1/8 of linen or evenweave, and some stranded cotton (plus a perle for Jenna) for each person in their colour preferences. So far, so good, everyone seems to like these:
For Jenna
For Tash
For Jinger
Phew! I think that’s about it.
February 28 2007 | Counted Stitchwork and Dyeworks and Finished and In Progress and Other Craft | 15 Comments »
Heads up, Angi, Jenna, Debbi, Jinger and Tash… your pay-it-forward packages are in the mail:smile:. I hope the recipient of the particular items shown above doesn’t mind that I have appropriated their image for my new Yuku avatar I had a lot of fun putting together five lovely packages of colour, and I hope you all enjoy them when they reach you (Tash, yours might be there by tomorrow, I’m guessing)
February 15 2007 | Dyeworks and Other Craft | 11 Comments »
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