Edit: this post originally linked to some hand-dyed floss which I had for sale, but which is no longer available 🙂
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Category Archives: Other Craft
Now Go Forth and Dye!
No, I’m not being rude. I just finally finished the tutorial for dyeing your own floss, that’s all :giggle: See here. I would love to hear about (and see) any results you might have if you follow this tutorial. Let me know if you have any questions or difficulty understanding my instructions. I tried to make it short, because the process really isn’t as difficult as it sounds, but I had to keep adding in extra bits of information, so it did get quite long.
I really, really ought to get a proper website organized for myself, I know, rather than using my blog for everything. I am supposedly qualified to do that, after all! I think I need to fill out one of those 101 goals in 1001 days which are popping up all over blogland, and make that a major goal!
Tutorial In Progress
Astute readers may have noticed that I managed to get halfway through my floss-dyeing tutorial before going on a little feeling-sorry-for-myself binge. (For you others, see the links at top-right of this blog :giggle: ). Fear not, the second (and most important) part is in progress. It is. It will be here in the next mumble-mumble days or so. And so will the opportunity to purchase some of my floss… for there is bunches and bunches of it just waiting for me to skein it up just for you 😉 Soon. Very soon.
Comments Off on Tutorial In Progress
Posted in Dyeworks, Other Craft
Tagged embroidery floss, hand-dyed
Creative Monday
I redeemed my most-excellent-Mum status yesterday :giggle: ?! You know, it struck me that this creative streak I’ve been on lately is actually my equivalent of that ‘nesting’ thing other women get. I always thought it was a myth, or I’d been completely overlooked when they handed out the nesting gene. During neither of my pregnancies have I been overly interested in home improvements (aka “doing the baby’s room”) or excessive housework :yuk: But I realise now that at about this point last time I was going through a bit of a ‘make-stuff’ phase as well. Amongst other things, I made a squishy frog toy for Finn, and hand-stitched a felt counting-book, which he still adores. I’d better start thinking of something along those lines to make for Small.
Finn has been wearing his ‘monkey shirt’ with pride today… it rapidly acquired yoghurt stains, but never mind that! He had complete artistic direction over that one – green with a monkey, please Mum! The orange one was more of an afterthought – I thought I’d have another try at the low-water immersion technique, but I never seem to get this exactly how I like it… I’m more of a control freak than this allows! The giraffe design was, um, nicked from the Internet somewhere (shhh), but the monkey is all mine 🙂
And yes, there was also more floss dyeing 😉 And here’s part 2 of “Ask and ye shall receive”. I’m working on an 18-step colour spectrum from which you will at some point soon be able to purchase (with pastel shades to follow). The following 6 skeins have been evicted from the line-up. Not because they’re bad colours, but because they were too close to others I already had. So… six of you lucky ducks get to grab a freebie. All you need to do is comment below – mention which colour you’d like (so that commenters below you know what’s been taken) then email me your address and I’ll have it in the mail asap. Easy!
Vital info: Skeins are 6 meters in length, as I’m keeping a portion for my records. To avoid confusion, let’s call them (left to right): magenta, purple, blue, green, orange, red (which is actually more of a dark orange). The purple does have some slight smudges of blue in places… let’s call that a Finn original!
PS. Forgot to add, it was pointed out to me by two someones that the Caron heart can be found here. Enjoy!
Fast Finish
Thanks for the lovely compliments, everyone. I am so pleased that you like my pretties as much as I do. In regard to sales… well, I’m not going to deny that the thought has crossed my mind. Essentially, I’m not planning to make a bona-fide business out of this, at least in the short term. First there is the concern I have that the hand-dyed market is probably at saturation point. Plus, with a three year old on hand, and another baby due shortly, it’s just not terribly practical. That said, however, I know that I’m going to be dyeing an awful lot more than I could possibly use, because I’m enjoying it so much. So who am I to turn down making a few dollars from the excess?! I’ll let you know more when the time comes. Certainly at the very least I am always good for trades 😉
Anyway, as requested by Debi yesterday, here’s a quick little HD using some of what I’ve dyed. I love this, and the fact that it took probably only two solid stitching hours makes me love it more! This is a free chart, which on my file system is entitled ‘Caron Freebie Heart’, but I couldn’t locate it anywhere on Caron’s website, so I can’t point you there, I’m afraid.
I did manage some more dyeing last night – mostly duplicates of what I’ve already done, for a couple of trades, but also a couple of darker skeins, which are quite striking. Tomorrow is a public holiday here, and a much more pleasant temperature than today, so if I get some more done I’ll post them then. Finn is becoming impatient for his monkey and giraffe shirts though, and today featured one of my poorer displays of parenting, so I might be printing instead 🙂
Colour, Colour, Everywhere
How can you not love a rainbow? You know, I’ve actually been planning to redesign my blog template for ages now, and in my head I had some images just like this one. I didn’t imagine it would be my own dyed flosses though. Whoo 🙂
The images today are scans, not photographs. By the time I had these all dry and skeined up, I had lost the decent light outside, so scans it was. The colour of the floss is more accurate, but there’s no decent depth of field. Sorry!
And in case you think I’m completely stuck on the brights, here’s a few more for you – some lighter shades of three of the above colours, with more subtle variation (different dilutions of light and dark shades). Also some neutrals. I really love the neutrals, but they’re so much more difficult to mix with any reliability. I’ve so far only been mixing from primary dyes, but I did pick up a pre-mixed brown the other day which I have yet to try, and I also plan to mix up some black to attempt some darker shades. Also in the works are some multi-coloured flosses – so far all of these are value-variations: different dilutions of the same colour applied to a single floss.
Oh… in other stashy news, my missing parcel has turned up right where it always was – back at SB&B. There was a miscommunication or two (it was a pretty convoluted order due to complex Secret Stitcher stuff), and it was filed rather than sent. D’oh. Nevermind, at least it has turned up, and it’s on its way to me now, for sure!
Hope you’re all having as fun a weekend as I am 🙂
My Apologies…
…to anyone in the north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne trying to find either B5200 or Blanc DMC floss this weekend – I’m afraid I’ve scooped the entire supply to support my ‘habit’ :giggle:
You see what is become of me? I’m paying $AU for my floss. Scary. I really can’t wait until I can sort out where to get the bulk cones from. I’ll update you on my venture tomorrow, promise. If I can drag myself away from my makeshift lab for a while, that is. I also have the beginnings of a ‘How-To’ post in the works, since tips have been requested by a few of you, here and on the BBs.
Must. Sleep.
(As proven by need to re-edit this post due to half finished sentence!)
I Rock!
Q: What is this?
If you guessed…
A: My first hand-dyed vareigated floss ever, you’re right! Yay me! 😆
I was doing some dyeing yesterday – I’ve been meaning to do a couple more t-shirts for Finn for a while, and finally found the time, space and energy to do it. No photos yet of the two shirts I dyed – I plan to print some jungle animals onto those at the weekend, so I’ll show you afterwards (erm… if they’re good, anyway!). But then I pulled out a couple of stitchers’ eighths of Cashel and tried out a new technique for fabric, the results of which I am very happy with:
Then… inspiration! Actually, I’ve wanted to try doing some floss for ages, and this time I suddenly remembered that I had a bunch of white floss from a trade a while ago. So I pulled a couple of skeins, and you see what happened. I am thrilled with how they’ve turned out, and I think I’ve found my new obsession :giggle: See, I love dyeing fabric, but evenweaves and linens aren’t exactly inexpensive, so I don’t get to do as much experimenting as I’d like to. Floss, on the other hand… it doesn’t really matter if I stuff up a few in the process. Well, OK, maybe not at $AU prices, but I’m currently looking into buying in some bulk cones of white from o/s, it should be much more economical. Wheeeee!
I’ve just dipped some more floss, so I’ll let you know tomorrow how that turns out. In the meanwhile, if anybody is interested, the green piece of fabric shown above, while lovely, is not quite the shade I was after, and I don’t have an immediate use for it. I’ll happily trade for something on my wishlist. The vital stats: it’s a 19″x14″ piece of hand-dyed Cashel linen (28-count). Email me 🙂
PS: The green fabric didn’t sit around long, it’s been snapped up already!
Pip and Loggin
Ha… lured you in with the promise of ‘fascinating’, didn’t I?! Well, maybe it’s not fascinating so much as ‘quirky’. Finn and I had a great time making sock puppets yesterday. Well, when I say we made them, I of course mean I made them. Finn was the project co-ordinator, and made all of the important colour decisions. So may I introduce to you ‘Pip’, on the left (otherwise known as the ‘trial run’, in which we discovered that glue didn’t cut it, and I was in fact going to have to use needle and thread), and ‘Loggin’, on the right, who has pointy ears “just like you Mum”! (Yes, I do indeed have a pointy ear… just one though. I must show you sometime :giggle: )
Small joys like sock puppets and a three year old boy who plays ‘pretend’ all day are helping to make my week better.
See you when I’m a ‘Master’ 🙂
My Machine And I
My sewing machine and I became reacquainted this weekend. It’s not like an old-friends-reunited kind of thing, nor do we have a love-hate relationship. My sewing machine and I have at times through my life merely tolerated one another for long enough for me to run off some simple crafty thing, or even try my hand at sewing my own clothes – sometimes with wearable results, sometimes notsomuch. I’ve given up on the clothes thing, at least for myself, though I do fully plan to try sewing up some children’s clothes when I have more time (ha!). But my latest little venture was into the world of patchwork. I give you… my first block:
See, my mother has decided recently she’s going to take up another hobby… I’m quite sure it’s just another excuse to spend money like there’s no tomorrow :giggle: As luck would have it, we have a nice little quilting store not 5 minutes from here (actually, it’s awfully lucky there isn’t a different kind of needlework store 5 minutes from here, or my budget would be in serious danger). Anyway, while we were browsing in there the other day, I forget how it came about, but the proprietor of the store announced that, as a cross stitcher, I would never make a quilt. Hmmm. Odd way of drumming up business, that. Anyway, I decided to scramble up some various fabrics to make up a block or four, basically just to prove I could. And I can. And no, quilting is definitely not for me. Too much messing about with measurements, too much precision, definitely too much ironing (ick, ack, ptuey!) But hey, I can do it, so there, lady! I made four blocks – one more identical to this, one the same in pinks, and a random-ish block made up of leftover half-square triangles and whatnot. I doubt they’ll ever find a home in a quilt, so perhaps she was right after all. Though I did rather take a liking to these imperfect squares that I found – they seem more my style 😉
I decided while the machine was out (since it is a fair ordeal to haul it out of the top shelf in my wardrobe), I would run up the drawstring bag Finn needs for borrowing books when he starts 3-year-old Kinder in a week’s time. Much less precision, much more fun, and I love this harlequin-y fabric?! This is 30x45cm as requested by Kinder – can’t wait to see the giant books he must be going to bring back with him!
Apart from that, the closest I got to stitching this weekend was also hauling out the overlocker to edge some various pieces of fabric for upcoming projects. I’ve finally decided on the fabric for my planned Lilly Conversion – Sapphire Sky from Silkweaver. Whether it will be my next new start though, I can’t say. Lots of my stash is screaming at me to be stitched, and I Just. Can’t. Decide!