The Finished Cuff

Do you recall this piece?
It was a piece of shibori dyed silk that kept all the lovely pleats after removing the stitching. I was going to felt it but couldn’t bear to lose all the beautiful creases so it became an experiment in trying to maintain shibori folds while felting…

This is what it looked like after felting:

Too narrow to be used as a book cover but just about the right length for a cuff / bracelet. After some cutting, stitching, addition of beads and a bit more felting it is finished:

This piece will be on sale at Unravel  in Farmham this weekend, if you are planning on attending this festival a few of my pieces will be on the West Surrey Spinners Weavers and Dyers stand, do come and say hello! Click here if you have no idea what I am talking about….

A Less Successful Method for Ice Dyeing Wool Prefelts

This is the other method I tried for ice-dyeing prefelts over the weekend, you might want to take a look at the results before giving this a go, I won’t bother with it again :o(

  • As before, I soaked my prefelts in water with 1/4 cup of vinegar and a drop of washing up liquid for every litre of water.
  • A wire cooling rack was suspended on some old glass jars in a washing up bowl and my wet prefelts were arranged on top.
  • Then a piece of nylon netting was stretched over the top using pegs to secure it.
  • Ice was tipped on top of the netting so that it covered the felt below.
  • Yellow, red and blue acid-fast dye powder was sprinkled over the ice, I used about twice as much yellow as red or blue.
  • I waited, and waited for the ice to melt, it looks really pretty at this stage:
  • The netting was removed and I put the icky brown mess into a zip lock bag.
  • Then I dropped it into my urn that was just bubbling and left it for 90 min.
These were the results, more than a bit disappointing…

Not one to waste anything I put another piece of prefelt into the dye run-off in the bottom of the washing up bowl and steamed that in its own zip-lock bag with the other piece, looks somewhat similar doesn’t it?

All is not lost though, one of the pieces from the ice dyeing did not receive much dye so I sprinkled some more dye powder directly onto the felt before putting it in a bag and steaming it. This was the result. I quite like this piece and it makes me want to try ice dyeing without the ice!

I also did another “jar of ice-dyeing” using the same primary colours used above, this is my favourite of the whole bunch… The jar method is definitely the winner! :o)

Linking up to nina-marie