I just realized I could dye linen

Spring Jeans: Muted floral filagree

Item: a pair of boot-cut, white-on-white jeans with embroidery. White House Black Market brand; I snagged them at Amvets Thrift in San Diego.

Idea: I wanted to try a cold, low-water immersion dye. I know my dyes only react with cotton and that the thread was most likely nylon. So I could immersion dye the fabric and the embroidered details would remain white.

Process:  I scrunched the jeans in a tupperware, added 7 different dye powder mixes to 1/2 cups of cold water and applied them to the pants in small splashes all over using a plastic syringe.  I allowed the dyes to dilute and creep along the fabric for about an hour before I fixed it with hot water and soda ash for another hour or so.  Once the pants were fully rinsed and dried I took them in at the seam to make more of a skinny cut instead of the boot-cut.  I could have allowed more time for the pants to fix but I wanted to color to be faded/muted so I did not batch overnight.

I had practiced the low-immersion dying last week:

The Orchid Cultivator, in the flesh!

Inspiration Series #1: The Lepidopterist’s Longsweater

In an effort to hone my skills I have started a series of projects inspired by and created for people I know and love.

The first item in this series was inspired by and created for Alicia.  She had recently taken up a hobby of cultivating orchids.  And I wanted to create a bright and colorful sweater or jacket that prominently featured orchids.  Something that would be suitable for chilly spring mornings or evenings.  

I realized right away there was a daunting variety of orchids of every shape and hue, and my first idea was to cover a sweater in an evenly spaced print of every type I could find, so that no orchid was repeated twice.  This was my first visualization:

I realized I would have to do some painstaking handwork to make something like this, and also would be mixing the dyes quite a bit more than ever before to get all the variety of hue.  I began to think this would be beyond my abilities.  I decided I should pick a color theme and limit it to only a few different shades.  I think Alicia looks best in either coral or turquoise.  I also realized that the orchids had beautiful, abstract patterns in their centers when they were reduced to their outlines and blown up to a large size.  For example:

Instead of featuring the full flowers I decided to use oversized segments of the flowers in a more abstracted way.  I found a pattern on Burda’s site for a long sweater that I thought would work well for this project, and shopped up two different versions.

I liked the turquoise better.  I designed a back for it and then got to work cutting out the pieces and hand-dying them with the orchids.  Here’s a piece of the pattern ready to be dyed on my heliodesk:  

Here are all the pattern pieces hanging up to dry after the dying:

And here’s the final product:

I’ve asked her to send along a picture of her wearing it.  Hopefully I can post that soon.

Mixing alpine prints: Fashion forward or faux pas?

Presenting: HELIODESK

Until now my tracing designs onto fabric has been done entirely with the help of a small and dim lightbox.  So small and dim it certainly did not deserve a name (not even a “Darling Lumensquare” or “Brother Bulbcrate”.  I was getting frustrated with the constant shifting and retaping and repinning of paper and material necessitated by the small working area of the box (no bigger than a standard sheet of paper).  So I decided to build myself a light desk.

Step one: buy a glasstop desk.  I looked on Craigslist and found one very reasonably priced in Oceanside.  And I got to meet a lovely family with the most adorable girl in the whole world.  She looked to be about a year and half old and had fire orange hair with a brown headband. She followed us around the whole time, keeping a respectful distant, but interjecting “Oh! Hi!” every minute or so, as if she was constantly delighted and surprised by my renewed presence.  But I digress, the desk:

I figured the top part could be a music station for Josh.  Then I went to my local home improvement goods store and purchased the following:

I got two 4-bulb fluorescent shop lights, a large oak panel, some nylon rope, a light cover to diffuse the light, and some bulbs.  I used my handy-dandy rotary tool I bought for shaping acrylic to punch some holes and suspended the oak panel under the glass top, placing the lights on top.  It turned out exactly as I imagined it and so I am DAMN pleased with myself, because things like this rarely do.  But without further ado… HELIODESK!

Already claimed by my boyfriend in the name of SCIENCE.

Onesies for one groovy baby

A coworker commissioned some tie dye onesies for a friend’s baby shower (it’s a boy!).  I’ve never tie-dyed before but I was up for trying something knew.  I looked up a few techniques online and made some samples that night.

A) scrunch B) spiral C) immersion D) twist

I like the immersion the most.  I just randomly gathered the fabric and shoved it down into a tupperware and poured the dye over it in places.  I probably should have stuck to these four types again because it’s never a good idea to try something new with the final material…. but I did something new ANYWAY.

I did one immersion and one twist.  They both turned out quite nicely, I think.

I tried to do one with multiple spirals.

I was pleased with this one too, even though the multiple spirals are not obvious.

And finally, I got really creative with my idea for a broken stripe pattern.  

It was an utter failure. The colors I chose were awful together (turquoise and fire engine red?!)  I used too much dye and barely any white was preserved.  It just looked like the stripes were drunk.  I ended up bleaching it out and trying over.  The bleaching turned the messy stripes into a much more interesting and pale sea foam green and peach.  I bunched the fabric over my finger and tied at the base to create circles, splashing them bright orange.  I was much happier with round 2.  The bleach unfortunately weakened the fiber and it tore around the fasteners.  I has to turn it into an itty-bitty t shirt instead.

Did a friend up like a tiger for Halloweens.

Leo Moore is a strange bird.