Hello there blog.  It’s been a while.  I have been reading all kinds of inspirational posts on all of the blogs I follow all about the year in review and all of the things everyone talked about and most popular posts and all of the goals for all of the things that they want to do.  I saw one whole post that was 12 different projects for the holidays that were all carefully color coordinated with tutorials and downloads and printables.  And while I actually enjoy reading it from everyone else, it just makes me wonder how some people have time to do that kind reminiscing and collecting of old posts and analyzing.  I would much rather spend my Christmas break cooking and reading and spending some time with my darling husband and elderly hound who I haven’t seen enough of this fall.

So none of that here.  I am sorry that I haven’t been posting much.  Not so much sorry for you, although I enormously appreciate all of you that read and lurk and comment, but really for myself.  This blog over the years has become a journal (hence the name) of all of my projects and I look back and reference things here all the time.  I love the idea of keeping a beautiful journal but the reality is, I am not a journal kind of girl.  But this blog works for me and I love it.  The last few months have been a challenge.  It’s been nothing earth shattering.  The people I love are safe and well.  I am safe and well, but I have been creatively and professionally challenged in ways that have squeezed a lot of what I am willing or able to share here in to a trickle.  It’s been stressful in good and bad ways and it has made me re-prioritize some things and totally drop the ball on a few things (which makes me crazy) and just plain let some things go.

But, I think we are heading towards the end of the drought and in that spirit, I have some Christmas presents that I am really proud of to share with you.  The handmade gifts were very carefully planned this year and although they didn’t arrive quite on time, they turned out beautifully and I am happy with them (and I believe the recipients were too.)

Mom got a handwoven camera strap (or maybe it is for binoculars).  She is a major birdwatcher and wildlife photographer, so she will use this, I think.  It is a pick up pattern on an inkle loom, made with 5/2 perle cotton, a few scraps of ultra suede, and some webbing/buckles I found on Etsy.  A pick up pattern is similar to brocade fabric, you choose threads out of the pattern and pick them up to float on top of the regular weave.  That is what is making the zig-zag/diamond pattern you can see.

Next, my youngest niece and nephew (ages 2 and 4) got a “Map to Uncle Andy & Auntie Becky’s House”.  I took a google map of our neighborhood, traced/simplified it in Illustrator and printed a fabric “map” of our neighborhood. (Thank you Spoonflower!)  I didn’t think it was too smart to post a map to my house for the whole internet to see, so you get a section of it so you get the idea.  We added all of the best parts of our neighborhood, like the pool down the street and the very important location of the coffee shop and the pizza place.  I filled in between the streets with photos of textures – grass, gravel, sand.  I found the little tiny cars and was really thrilled to get a set with a police car, fire truck, garbage truck and parking enforcement.  Then finally three big dice with different locations on each face so you can roll the dice and drive to each location, making a very simple game for them to play.  Mommy has to read the words right now, but I think after not too long they will start to recognize the words on their own.  This niece and nephew live out in very rural farm country and so the city is a pretty fun thing to play pretend about.

My youngest sister got the (hopefully) ultra cool accessory of the season.  A giant cowl made from baby alpaca with a tiny bit of sparkle.  This thing is seriously decadent.  Seed stitch with a half twist before I seamed it up, so it has a little mobius shape happening.

Mom got the poker chip silk scarf.  I hosted a “dye day” just before Christmas for my new co-workers to make gifts for their family members and I did this one and knew that my mom had to have it.  It is a technique called itajime shibori and is folded and then clamped with poker chips (top and bottom of the folded scarf) held in place with clothespins.  Then you add the dye and the poker chips mostly keep the dye out and leave polkadots.  (You can get fancier tighter clamps and make the resist shapes very distinct, but I like this more organic look better.)

Finally, it was the year of the bat for my dad.  He is an architect and one of his projects this year involved some renovation on some historic buildings.  Historic buildings that happen to be home to an endangered species of bat.  (Which means you have to remove the bats before you can renovate and you just can’t even imagine what that involves.)  So the bat jokes and puns have been a thing this year.  I found a great collection of other batty items for him on Etsy (which I will show off tomorrow), but this ornament was my contribution.  A snoozing bat for the Christmas tree.  (He’s about 3 inches long.)

Hoping you all had a creative and peaceful holiday with your loved ones.  Cheers to the new year!

Polyvinyl acetate aka the good stuff

I just finished ranting about hot glue and four year olds over on Facebook and I thought I should share with you at the blog.  We have a dye lab where I work, which is a super-cool-amazing classroom space that is set up for just about every kind of messy project out there AND you can rent it for the day and do all of your messy projects right there.  It has 4 ventilation hoods, it has safety equipment, it has washers and stainless steel counters.  It is seriously cool.

It is also the place where strange things go to die (and I don’t mean dye!)  Because it is a shared space, strange chemicals sometimes wander in and then don’t go back to their rightful homes.  About twice a year, I go through all of the shelves and boxes and sort out the mystery chemicals.  Sometimes it is things like laundry soap or salt, which are easy to get rid of, but sometimes it is things I don’t know what to do with, like glacial acetic acid or urea.  I don’t want to just dump things down the sink without neutralizing them or disposing of them safely.

So I always spend some time with MSDS sheets.  That stands for Materials Safety Data Sheet.  You can look up nearly any chemical and see what it is, what it does, what you should worry about and how to get rid of it.  Very useful.

So I looked up ethylene vinyl acetate, aka hot glue.

Hazardous decomposition products:  ACETIC ACID, TOXIC AND IRRITATING FUMES AT TEMPERATURES >204 °C.

Hmmm.  So I looked some more.  Hot glue melts between 250-380 degrees.  Easily hot enough to release bad fumes.  No other major red flags, but enough there to make me not want to use it with a classroom of kids without some good ventilation.  (And that’s ignoring the fact that it is hotter than boiling water and I don’t want anybody burning themselves.)

How to find them?  You can google “MSDS” with the name of the chemical.  ProChem (where we order a lot of the dye lab chemicals) has MSDS for all of their products posted right on their website.  Dharma does too.  End PSA.

Thank you for all of the great suggestions!  It was fun seeing how all of you saw things in the different color combinations.

Sugar Cookie was supposed to be my holiday colorway.  Because I make a lot of holiday ornaments with these, I got a lot of requests last year for “red & green”.  So this is my “red, green, pink & white”.  I think “sugar cookie” makes it work for the holidays, but not seem “out of season” the rest of the year.

“Amphibian” came from the Kermit & muppet movie suggestions and thinking about the colors of newts and poison dart frogs.

“Ballpark” was inspired by “ketchup & mustard”.

I will weave up some samples soon so you can see them in action.

… and not one of them I’d swap.”

Five new colorways for my little loom ornaments and I would like to solicit naming suggestions once again!  The winning suggestions from the last set of colorways were pond, lorikeet, blackberry, rhubarb and superman.  (Superman and Rhubarb have so far been the best sellers out of that batch.)

Please leave your ideas in the comments.  (You can call them A, B, C, D, E or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to identify.)

These are Cascade superwash wool, dyed with acid dyes.  The first skeins of handpainted yarn I made, I was really unimpressed with.  Acid dyes are very different to work with than the fiber reactive dyes I use all the time.  The acids and I have made friends though finally and these mini skeins turned out just how I was hoping they would!

My favorite yarn for making the tiny weaving loom ornaments has been discontinued and so I needed some variegated yarn with very short repeats or color sections.  When you are weaving something that is less than 2 inches across, you need only a few inches of each color to get nifty stripes.  So this afternoon I split up a ball of nice wool yarn and I dyed 5 new colorways.  Now I need to give them names.  When I sell these in my etsy shop, you choose the colorway – I weave one up for you “on demand” out of one of these yarns, so each one varies a bit but you will have the set of colors you choose.  I am thinking #1 is Rhubarb and #4 is Violas, but would love suggestions for all 5.  What would you call these colors?

My mom got me this sweater in green for Christmas.  It is my very favorite sweater.  Andy calls it my Mr Rogers sweater because nearly every day I come home from work and I change out of my work things and I put on my green sweater.  I love it so much I got on LLBean and I ordered another one.  The only problem was the only color they had in my size was geranium pink.  Andy convinced me to order it, but when I put it on he laughed at me.  It was so pink it glowed.  Not working for me.  So I dyed it and look at the lovely iris purple color it turned out.  The goddesses of dyes were with me.

I used iDye, which I have talked about before and I am a big fan.  It seems to work really well for all-over even color with fairly little effort.  This was 2 packets of navy and one of violet.  That was probably more dye than I really needed, but I wanted to make really sure that the pink was gone.  I followed the instructions for dyeing it in my washing machine.

I found matching buttons (in the right size and color!) and last night part of my mending was replacing the bright pink buttons with the matching ones.  Have saved the pink buttons because they are really cute.

If you look really closely there are a few threads of poly/lycra/spandex knitted in to the ribbing areas and a little bit of pink stitching.  The iDye only works on plant fibers, which those things are not.  The cool thing about these dyes is that I could have added a packet of navy iDye Poly to the same dye bath and it would have taken care of those fibers.  I didn’t think of it ahead of time and I decided that the tiny bit of pink was really just not enough to matter.  But maybe next time.

I took a class in dyeing wool last night.


We did a 12 step color wheel. Such beautiful saturated colors. Don’t know what to do with these pieces yet but they are pretty to look at.

2010, 8 x 8 inches

Materials: cotton fabrics, hand dyed and commercially printed

Techniques:  shibori dyed cotton, raw edge applique, hand-embroidery

I started this piece with the idea of making something a bit more abstract than it turned out to be.  The shibori fabric that makes the water was an experiment.  I didn’t want to get my whole dye kit set up, so I dyed it on the patio table using a textile paint.  It’s a magical process called “sunpainting” and works very much like blueprint /sunprint paper you can buy.  Paint the fabric, cover part of it with something that blocks the light and the shadowed parts of the fabric will stay lighter, the parts in the sun will get dark.  I wrapped my drippy painted fabric around a PVC pipe, scrunched it together and set it in the sun.  Every little while I unrolled a bit of the fabric as it started to dry, so the inside layers would get the sunprinting treatment.  At the end, gorgeous ripply watery looking fabric.

This was created for a specific exhibit with the 8×8 inch size specified.  Working small like this made me think of a macro camera lens and capturing only part of a scene, so I went looking for something with interesting feet that could be wading in my newly dyed water.  An egret with yellow toes seemed to fit the scene just perfectly.  The rest of the scene was assembled by cutting and layering the fabrics, stitching the edges and adding a little shading and shadows with a colored pencil.  Last I embroidered her dainty toenails.

This was donated to an auction to benefit the Dahl Art Center galleries in Rapid City SD, where I grew up.  The artists were anonymous until after the auction had ended, so I had to keep this under my hat.  I hope it went to an appreciative home!

I took a class on Tuesday night about using transfer or disperse dyes.  These are the kinds of dyes used on polyester, which is not a very dyeable fiber.  The process we used for these was to paint with them on paper.  At the strength we used them they were almost like painting with watercolors.  You could do all kinds of drips and play with salt and spray bottles to make textures in the wet paint.  I mostly used a really grungy beat up paintbrush because I wanted a lot of brush strokes and stray smears for texture.

The colors when you paint with them are very dull and in most cases nothing at all like the finished piece once it is printed.  The yellow is a deep mustard color as paint, but bright bright sunflower yellow when printed.  It is very much a leap of faith to know that what you are painting and what you will get are not going to be the same colors.  I didn’t want saturated primaries, so I dulled my colors down by adding a few drops of the complementary color to the mix – my red got some green in it etc and I mixed a custom palette before I started painting.

You paint enough paper to cover your piece of fabric.  I made 3 large sheets and a bunch of smaller ones.  Wait for everything to dry.  Then you sandwich your fabric against the painted side of the paper and put the whole thing in to a heat press.  My friend Karen has a press that is 15 inches across, so we could do 15 inch sections at a time.  16 seconds at 400 degrees and the colors transfer from paper to fabric.  It is the combination of the high temperature and the pressure of the press that makes the dyes vaporize and then re-combine with the polyester fibers.  Magic.

This is about 3 layers of printing and I printed the back as well.  The fabric is a drapy peachskin polyester.  Karen taught me how to do a hand-rolled hem, too, so I am hemming this one to wear it as a scarf.

As of tomorrow, I will have 3 art quilts on exhibit simultaneously at three different galleries.  How cool is that??

This is “Chicken Little”.  He is currently on display as part of “A Common Thread”, annual Textile Center members’ exhibition.  8″x9″, cotton fabrics with some handdyed by me, hand embroidered, hand stitched, machine quilted.  I made it originally for the MN State Fair’s “Quilt-On-A-Stick” but then I spaced out the deadline and didn’t get it turned in on time.  So I saved it so it could be in this show.

This is “Intersect”, which is on display starting tomorrow at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for “A Foot in the Door”.  11 1/2 inches square.  My handdyed cotton, machine pieced, hand embroidered.

And this one, “Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?” is traveling with the Original Sewing & Quilt Expo and is currently in Tampa, FL.