The return of Blossom Girl

I've had a rather interesting weekend this weekend....some of which I'll share with you down the road (but not yet).


One of the lovely things that this weekend has afforded me is the chance to continue painting Blossom Girl. I get to spend a couple of hours today putting the shadows into the roses, making the dark purple much more - defined. The photo above is a progress photo (bad angle), and the second photo is with all of the dark purple completed.

There are still areas that I'd like to make a little darker, either with thread or with more ink. It helps to look at the photos on this scale, as I can see things in the image that I'm missing when I look at her regularly.


I'm excited about finishing her soon, and am looking so forward to finding out what she'll look like all stitched up.

Hope you're having a good weekend,

Lisa

Fulled, baby

One of the peculiarities of fulling knitted fabric is the proportion in which it shrinks. Knitted fabric shrinks far more vertically than horizontally. I was astonished at how much more. You can see in the picture of the ruler on the basket bottom that the horizontal shrinkage was really only about 1 " over the 10.5" of the pre-fulled size.

The next couple of pictures are much more dramatic:

The side shrank from 9" to 5"! The whole basket now stands about 12", including the handles. The stitch definition is totally gone, and the fabric is thick, yummy, scrummy..... I think there are fulled slippers in our future. (Yep, definitely. The knitted socks would be p-r-e-t-t-y funny looking, pre-fulling!) One of the nicest things about this pattern was that it was written with this wacky proportioning in mind and the finished basket is a lovely, useful size and proportion.

Oldest did me the favour of holding it open so that I could take a picture...



Oh, and yesterday I did Kool-Aid dying with the grade 7 class. Here are the hanks drying at home. If you ever get the chance to go in and do this with a bunch of interested, motivated kids, it's totally worth it. What a great time!






May your day be full(ed) and Kool,

Lisa

Finished silk scarves

I found a little time here and there over the weekend to finish up all the silk scarves. I can't tell you how happy I am with them! The colours are so luminous, translucent. Very pretty.

Using the Shiva paintstiks proved to be interesting, as silk is somewhat wiggly and squiggly, not wanting to stay put. It made doing the rubbings challenging, but well worth the effort. For most of the scarves I kept the colours in the same or analogous colour family (some were highlighted with a little sparkle,too) so that the effect was more 'emergent' than stamped or printed on top.

It would be hard to pick a favorite out of these!

The grape colour to the left is actually a rich plum in real life, and for some reason I can't get it to photograph well.

All 12 scarves, done.

Back to quilting!

Cheers,

Lisa

Kool silk

Working on the assumption that wool and silk are both protein fibres, I tried the same methods that I tried last month for sock yarns on the remaining silk scarves....success!

The photo does NOT do the colours justice. There is almost no natural light around here these days, certainly not powerful enough to get a decent photograph. These colours are beautiful Kool-Aid bright and lustrous.

The only thing I did differently from the sock yarn was to use a much larger bowl and more water so that I could agitate things with a wooden spoon in between zaps in the microwave. That and pre-dampening the scarves helped to give lovely, even colour. Next stop, Shiva Paintstiks! I have it in my head that they would look wonderful with an allover rubbing design of some kind, in lustrous colours...

I dyed all those scarves (7 in all) while making dinner last night. Can't beat that for multitasking.

Happy stitching,

Lisa

A week in review...

Believe it or not, I've been writing blog posts all week - in my mind. At one point I came quite close to posting a photo of my studio in all it's quilty mayhem - I finished several quilts this week and there was a point at which I had 3 finished quilts waiting to be boxed and mailed, one finished quilt hanging to be photographed, and two out in different areas in the room with thread proposals on them waiting to be photographed and emailed to the quilt's owners. Somehow I opted to just keep working instead.

Today I've got my machine part way through my 'large maintenance routine', waiting for the WD40 to drip out of the bobbin area. Every month or so I take a day to check the timing on the machine (99% of the time it is fine), clean out the excess oil from inside the machine head, clean all the wheels and rails thoroughly ( I use q-tips with rubbing alcohol on them on the wheels) and clean out the bobbin race really thoroughly with WD40. It's amazing how much gunk gets in there, even though I wipe out that area frequently with my stiff brush and oil often. Once the WD40 has dried completely, I'll re-oil the bobbin race, let it run for a while, then stitch out some test bits to make sure there is no yucky stuff in the oil, no residue left in the race, and then I'll be ready to go again.

This week I did a bit of playing with my new-to-me knitting machine, and have consequently ordered some parts for it (!).

I did finish a hand knitting project I've been working on for over a month, a fan-and-feather stitch shawl in a lovely, soft merino wool I bought on Etsy. I'd give you a link to the specific store, but it seems to have temporarily evaporated! The photos, sadly, do not do this hand-dyed yarn justice. It's far more plummy/purply/raspberry/rhubarb than the photos here would suggest.

I also crocheted a couple of child-sized hats for a charity my Mom works at...and I realize now with our long weekend they'll not get to her until Wednesday (sorry, Mom. The holiday/post conflict completely slipped my mind).

I got a little bit more work done here and there on Blossom Lady, mostly just filling in the background with a nice dark indigo blue (their name for it is 'Midnight'), and deepening some of the shadows in her garment.

Now that there is some real contrast going on the areas that I was already working on seem quite washed out...time to go put some BOLD contrast in this baby. Unfortunately I spilled one of my ink pots on my work space and now have to wait until it is THOROUGHLY washed and dried before I dare to put the piece back on it. Of course I spilled the darkest colour. Of course I lost more than half the little dye pot to my clumsiness. Blargh.

Well, off to check on my machine and put it back together. It always runs so much happier after this little wee pick-me-up.

Happy stitching,

Lisa

PS - I was floored by an unexpected and generous hearted gift this week. Thanks so much, Tracy. You really touched my heart. Thank you.

:)
L

Blossom Lady gets a new dress

Again, not the greatest angle, but things are starting to really take shape now. I stood on a chair to take this picture, so the angle is slightly 'up' the figure, further accentuating the bottom part of the piece.

The dye I used for the dress and hairband is 'Sky Blue' - a lot like a nice cerulean blue. Having some of the sepia ('Autumn Leaf' - much like a burnt sienna) lightly pushed into the shadows was really helpful when it came time to do the blue for the dress. I've never worked a single colour over such a large area before and there were many challenges to be met in getting the colour even in the large, open, lightest areas. I tried several techniques and finally settled on working with a really dry paintstick in large motions in the 'grain' of the fabric's wrinkles.

I didn't want this to get too dark yet because I'll eventually fill the inside area of the ring with some very dark colours, and I want to be sure to have enough contrast to let the figure remain in the foreground. It's hard to let it go, but there are many hours of painting left and only so many for sleep before the new day comes. I love how the few 'tightened up' roses have so much dimension. It bodes well for the rest of the piece, I think.

I should probably go and try to sleep now.

All the best,

Lisa

Blossom girl sepia wash...

Pardon the oddball angle, but with this on the table it's hard to get a good shot of her. I've been doing the sepia toned wash today, and you can see that I'm setting up some shadow areas in the drapery of her dress. Just a sense of where the shadows will fall, nothing too definitive just yet.

I love this stage (do I say that at every stage?) as the image really does grow and change from minute to minute.

I'm looking forward to working on it more after supper. The sepia is not done yet.

Don'tcha just love how the contrast just brings the image into 3 dimensions? I think I'll cutaway trapunto or false trapunto the figure and maybe the roses, too. We'll see.

Happy Monday,

Lisa

*edited to add - the funny line shadows that are in the left of the photo are actually shadowing coming through the muslin from the big ironing pad that I have underneath the piece (It's a big machine quilting practice sandwich. Multiuse). On the right, the big shadow is the iron. I tend to work really hot and dry (fabric, that is) for the detail stuff, and a little more loosely in the larger areas. If you've ever used these inks you know that they want to BLEED. Any time there is a hard line I've really heated things up so that the ink is drying almost as it's applied.*

Blossom girl continues...

No, really, I do other things than going through old knitting magazines...
Thanks for the comments, though. Gosh, they're fun. Don't encourage me too much, ladies, 'cause I've also got some Beehive pattern books from the '30's and '40's that are ripe for lampooning!

Yesterday afternoon and last night I got back to working on the Blossom Girl. Once I traced her on to the fabric (Roc-Lon bleached muslin with mechanical pencil) I untaped everything from the wall upstairs and moved it down into my studio. I'm pretty lucky with the size of my space - there was room enough for both drawings to be pinned to my design wall, then to work at the sewing table (a twin to our dining table...DH made them both for me).

When working with Tsukineko inks I find it's best to work up in layers of colour, much like watercolour (all those who followed me through this process in Jan/Feb for the Cherub Quilt might not find this part all that interesting).

The first wash was done in Banana Creme (their colour name). It was applied to the parts of the painting that are going to have skin tones, or as under painting for areas like leaves and the circle that she's sitting in.

The next wash was done in Apricot - again focusing on the areas the will be warmest in colour.

This time, just so that I could keep an eye on how the whole piece is developing, I started in with the Orchid colour, then the Celadon. Normally I'd work the warm tones all the way up through their next two (at least) washes, but because the piece is so big, it was better to work over larger areas.

If you enlarge the photo at left you'll see some of the roses to the far left have already had some dark purple (purple mist? I'll have to look up that name) shadows pushed into them.

I know things look a little amorphous at this point, but stick with me...it'll all come together. And if it doesn't? I've got another piece of muslin waiting in the wings.

Happy Monday,

Lisa

(P.S. I'm totally jealous of all you Houston travellers out there....have fun, have fun, have FUN)
:)
L

Socks and more socks - some dying, too

At long last, a photo of my finished socks (I know you've all been on the edge of your seats).

The sock I had to dye more wool for is the one on top in the photo, and you can see that the stripes are thinner. I think I know why this is, and could probably closer replicate the first yarn now. The socks had been worn, washed and dried by the time I took the photo...the colour did not fade one bit, but they don't smell QUITE so candy-like any more.

(*note* they are actually the same length, not different lengths as they look in the photo. Really.)

My boys think this whole process is pretty neat, and asked if I could make some socks for them. Oldest requested blue and red wool, and his are coming along quite nicely. I used Strawberry KoolAid for his red, not Fruit Punch as I used in mine, and found that his took longer to rinse out after dying. I'm hoping that this red is as colourfast as the one I used on my own.

Also, I pre-weighed the wool and needles before I started his sock, and at various points throughout weighed the work in progress. I'm pretty sure I have a 25 gram sock. I have 25 grams of wool remaining. Cross your fingers for me that I'll have another 25 gram sock! Oldest's feet are only 2.5 cm shorter than my own right now. Soon his socks will be as big as mine!

Youngest wanted to try something with three colours, so we have dyed his wool blue (using Ice Blue flavour), green (with that oh-so lovely Lime), and purple (two packets of Grape).

The dye baths for this batch exhausted really quickly! Does anyone who does dying out there know if it's because of the lower amount of water-to-dye ratio? I used two packets of each colour, but only in about 300ml water (otherwise it wouldn't have fit in the microwave). The green exhausted in the first 3 minutes, the blue not long after (that white stuff in the blue bath does not attach itself to the fibres, but remains in the glass...and people drink this stuff???). The purple never really did completely exhaust, but I didn't really expect it to as seems to be the case with my limited experience of KoolAid red dyes.

Here's Youngest's after rinsing in the sink. I've since dried and rolled it, and that purple has kept it's dark plummy colour.

There. More than you ever wanted to know about our socks!

:)
Lisa

Oh NooooooOOO!

Can you see it? The end?

I swear I knit far faster when I think I'm starting to run out of wool.

I get to try on my 'dye lot' skills now....do you think that I can dye the next skein to knit up in the same stripes? Could Superwoman?

Hmmm.

At least this gives me time to contemplate a name for this wool colourway. What do you think...Watermelon? Or Grinch?

And it gives me time to contemplate what I'll do with the remaining wool after I'm done. A third sock would probably use up exactly the remaining wool. Then instead of a pair, I'd have a 'thrair'. That would be handy if I ever lost a sock.

I should probably knit mittens in 'thrairs'. At least for the boys.

In the meantime, I'll just work, I guess, and go downtown later to see if they have any of this particular wool still, and to the grocery store to see if they have the same Kool Aid available.


Happy stitching,
Lisa