eco dying!

              

Lovely little workshop with a local art professor on eco dying. Decided it's not my most favorite thing in the world, but then it's possible that it was more the material than the method. 

Beware artists bearing plastic juice containers. It might not be consumable.

This is the alum you want for dying - the sort you pickle with, not bake with

  

I'm writing this well after the fact, so my memory is a little hazy on the details. It was summer, it was hot outside, we were enjoying each other's company and dabbling. 

marbling

 Making glass marbles would be an absolute hoot, but in keeping with the fiber theme, in April of this year the local fiber guild hosted a marbling workshop. 

 

I had done marbling with kids using liquid starch and acrylic paint [still working out the kinks of how watered down the paint needs to be for it's density to allow it to float rather than sink; I will get back to you on that]. This was next level, professional grade dyes, some water additive that I am forgetting - my brain wants to say some kind of algae - and fabric pretreated with alum, but not the alum you bake with.  

      

Here we are getting our initial instructions. Our flick sticks are plastic/ nylon broom ... I don't know what the word is for them, but they were pulled out of a dollar store broom and bundled. The instructor told us to start with black dye - its there, in the bottom picture, but you may have to look for it. 

With more colors, the black is more visible. The set up is to just flick or drop dye onto the water bath, then use a skewer or comb to pull, swirl, et cetera, designs. It was rather mesmerizing to watch the dyes swirl around with just a little coaxing.

And then we all went nuts.

    

If/ when I do this again, I would have a drying rack situation sorted, as I clearly resorted to sticking bits of fabric wherever I thought air would be able to circulate around them