I find myself creating a fair amount of landscapes, so I am in search of the perfect hand marbled color for river rocks. The first one is Grey in the Freestyle design and the second is Pelican in the Freestyle design as well. Pelican has a bit more Brown in it and the Grey has a bit more Gray/Blue. I took a look at my river rock collection from my years guiding on the Kenai River in Alaska and figured out that I need a selection.
I received this email several days ago and thought it might be of interest to others.
Hello,
I am the metal smith, I just wanted to let you know: (you might already know this, if so, disregard this message!) iron in fabric, will eventually rust away eating the fabric as well. The iron continues to rust even though it seems to have “set”. I am involved in living history, and have seen old fabrics that had been dyed with fabric dye that had iron as a component of the dyestuff. The fabrics look as though they had been cut along the lines that were printed with the iron rich dye…
I do not usually barge in on someone, or on blogs, etc, but with all that you have going, you might not have run across the rust “results”. What you are doing is wonderful, and I love your experiments…the snow printing, etc…is like the kinds of stuff we do here too…kindred spirits abound, even when we do not know it. I home school my daughter, and we are always finding things out, and trying them!
Keep up the beautiful work!
Dawn Hoffmann
I am aware that Rust printed fabrics will continues to rust at a very, very very slow rate even after they have been “set”. I figure that it is a choice, artistic v. lasting longer. As we have seen with antique, Cotton will not last forever, but if care is taken it will last a very long time.
I was not aware that older dyes used iron components, but is does make sense a dyes were originally made from natural ingredients one of those being minerals.
Here are a couple of my most recent Snow Dyed fabric pieces. Violet Ice on the left and one of the Maroon Pastels on the right. These are two of my favorites, I love to dramatic colors and the ice fractures that add texture to the fabric design. I still have a few For Sale on my Marbled Arts web site www.marbled-arts.com. Take a peek, they are going fast and they are the last until the snow flies next winter.
This is my favorite piece of snow dyed fabric so far. I have been having a ton of fun trying new things and experimenting. With snow dying you just never know what will happen. Different dye colors attach at different rates, some come out bold and others more subtle. And it all depends on the rate that the snow melts at and how fast the fabric arrives at the setting temperature. The photo at the top is the entire yard piece. The one on the bottom is a close up, that shows the fractures the snow produces. And yes, I now have some of my snow dyed pieces on my web site Marbled Arts for sale. Go to Hand Made fabric and then Snow dyed. Or type snow dyed into the search box.
Here we are once again. My rust printed fabric is a hit. I started using it in my quilt samples, because it has a very organic feel to it. That lead to selling it in my booth at quilt shows. And now, finally, I have it on my website. Check it out at Marbled Arts. Look in Hand Made Fabric. I am selling it in Fat Quarter, Fat Halves and Yard pieces. I also here that I will be getting some broken transmission parts soon. It seams that they have been in a swamp for a long time and have lots of gunk and oil on them. A little to much for even me. But I cant wait to see what appears on my doorstep.
This is the final product from one of my first snow dying experiments. I love how it came out, the fabric appears to have texture and depth. You can see where the ice crystals formed as the snow melted. And of course I now have tons of ideas to try out, different colors, a mix of colors, different amounts of snow and dye. The combinations are endless.
No, it has not snowed at my house just yet, but my husband is on Ski Patrol. On Friday, he had his first duty day of the year and it snowed.
When went out for my walk on Saturday morning I discovered all of this wonderful snow in the back of the truck. I scooped a bunch into one of our camping coolers and then started gathering all of the stuff I would need to dye fabric using snow. I saw an article in a recent issue of Quilting Arts. I had planned to hunt up a few items to make it easier to dye the fabric, but the snow arrived and I made it up as I went along.
When I mixed the dye into the snow it looked so yummy I wanted to eat it, but dye is not to be ingested. I started this particular adventure with two pieces of fabric and two different colors. Waiting for the snow to melt was the hardest part.
I am in the middle of getting all the pieces made for a quilted wearable art jacket. This is one of the panels that I made using Shiva Paintstiks. I used two colors of matte green and iridescent copper. I like using the matte and the iridescent colors together. The iridescent give it a bit of sparkle and shine but isn’t overpowering for my tastes. I believe that Wearable Art is far beyond just clothing, that it is Art that is meant to worn. Creation takes time and energy. I’ll let you know when my jacket is in it’s final state.
Yet another Silk Scarf. This one started with dying the scarf Turquoise and then stenciling the multi color Firebird and surrounding it with Green Ginkgo leaves with a hint of Gold . That’s when I discovered that the 1/4″ brushes really come in handy to get color in all of the little openings. I wanted to use multiple colors for the Firebird and the 1/4″ brush made it possible with out me going nuts.
It is always fun to create new things. This is one of my new silk scarves. I dyed the silk Red and then used a couple of different stencils to create the Bamboo design. The paintstik brushes were used to apply the opaque Turquoise color and stencil brush to add the hint of sparkle with Gold.