People on Etsy - Treasury

menzocollection decided to make a treasury, featuring etsy people "because we're all the face of etsy". What a great idea.
I am grateful to be included, actually, it is my daughter, wearing my light blue funky nuno felted top.

Visit the treasury here

Rust Treasures

Here are 2 of the many rust items in my growing collection. Yes, I plan to experiment a lot more with rust dyeing.

This is the hotplate that I used for dyeing the T-shirt in my previous post.

An old wok; I have used it for dyeing fabric and now the rusting went further and it created some rust dust.

Rust Dyeing

I listed this rust tunic this morning on etsy.

Here is a photo of the rusted silk fabric, used in the tunic, that I have obtained by rolling it around a rusty bar:

And here is a yellow T-shirt that I dyed with rust from an old hotplate:

Australian Treasures

I just felt like sharing this amazing etsy treasury "Australian Treasures", made by artnomadix.
And of course, I am proud that my shawl "Butterfly Flight" is included.

Visit the treasury page until Tuesday april 6th and visit the Australian etsy artists:

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=123837

Some more dyeing with yellow cosmos

Yesterday, I promised you a follow-up post on how I dyed my skeins with yellow cosmos. I wanted to make multicoloured yarn and crochet a jumper for me out of it. Well, I have finished the dyeing, the crochet is still to be done.

I have first mordanted the yarn with alum. In the meantime I boiled the yellow cosmos flowers (freshly picked from our garden) in water and poored the liquid through a sieve. This liquid,the dye bath, became dark yellow to brown and the wool was heated up in there to just under boiling point. I kept it at that temperature for an hour or so. The picture below shows the results.


I used iron water as a modifier, by painting it on certain areas of the wool, you can see it below.

I gave it some time to react, although it went very fast and here, you can see already how the colour has changed to olive green at certain areas.


Below you can see the final stage:
I painted on a solution of baking soda, dissolved in water, only at some places. The yellow turned orange and the green turned brown.
I now have skeins with several different colours: yellow, orange, olive green, which turned out even a bit grey at some areas, brown and a few shades in between.

Here is also a link to a previous post about dyeing with yellow cosmos:

http://lizetfrijters.blogspot.com/2008/11/magic-yellow-cosmos.html

Spinning

I have been very busy with spinning lately and I love the combination of the merino wool and the silk in these skeins. I spon the wool and the silk and than made it into a 2ply. It looks lovely and feels really soft.

Tomorrow, I will show you some images of how I have dyed the skeins.