day 15 Res. Logwood.

Logwood
Logwood comes from the very heart of the tree. It sounds very bad from an ecological point of view, so I just looked it up and found that there are various projects around the world which are growing and harvesting logwood in a sustainable way. Here is a link to a project in the Caribbean.

The dyebath had been used previously to dye quite large pieces and today it dyed  lots and lots of samples, and still seems to have life in it so a little obviously goes a long way.

Most plant dyes produce yellow, or brown. Logwood makes a gorgeous purple. It is very pretty and I can imagine how excited the first people to discover it, must have been!

At left.
Logwood on Tussore silk (tussah silk?)

Bottom of page (top to bottom)
Logwood on thick wool blanket, thinner wool blanket, linen, cotton. I was amazed how well it took on the linen and cotton as most plant dyes do better on protein fibres.

Pretty amazing stuff but should be saved for special occasions.

Artist res Day 12 - foils

I wanted to find out if I could screenprint with Jones Tones Plexiglue and then use foil. Well the answer is yes you can screenprint with the glue as long as you work fast and wash out the glue before it can set in the silkscreen. It did very fine detail. See below for screenprint (foiled).

To use Jones Tones glue and foil, you draw, paint, print, squirt it onto the fabric then wait till it dries and then use the sheet of foil and rub it, (shiny side up) over the glue. The next stage is to put one of the samples in the washing machine and wash as normal to see how much comes off in the wash.

Two samples didn't work well, they were both on fine silk. The glue soaked right through and there wasn't enough on the surface for the foil to stick to.

The example above was on cream silk tussore. It didn't seem sticky enough to grab the foil.

On the left is crepe silk, again the glue seems to have sunk too far in.
On the right is the glue painted onto thicker silk crepe. The glue is thick and sitting on the surface so the foil stuck to it.

Artist res Day 11

I finished last week's commission just in time.  I worked from 9am on friday morning through to 6.45am on saturday morning. I finished 15 minutes before the quilt was picked up by the producer on the way to the airport. Now I have started on the third quilt for the same company. To be finished by Saturday morning. I can feel another all nighter coming on!

Consequently I don't have any really cool experiments to show off for either yesterday or today. I hope to get back into the swing of it next week but in the meantime I am earning money towards my trip to Japan in April.

Here are two pieces of fabric which were unwrapped on Tuesday. The first is a classic hippie tie-dye spiral which I did to show the technique to the students. This time I left out the pink (Procion MX8) as it is so lurid. Maybe I should have warned the Venturers about that last week as all theirs turned out very pink.

 The second piece is a bit of wool blanket which had leaves of a New Zealand native tree (shiny dark green leaves, forgotten the name) wrapped up in it and it was rolled around a piece of pipe and pole wrapped to keep all the layers tightly together. It was then boiled in plain tap water for about 4 hours but still looked very boring so I left it lying in a rusty baking tray over the weekend with a little water.

The NZ leaves are deinitely making a pink eco print. Maybe I should have left it to cook for longer. My thanks to Cleo for telling me the type of leaf. Pity I can't remember either Cleo's surname or the name of the tree! I'll edit this page when I have the info.

Day 10. Distracted by a chance to make money...

I have been commissioned to make another quilt for a company (all will be revealed some day) with a very short time frame. Friday 13th will be an all day marathon to get it done in time. Lets hope that 'Black friday' doesn't live up to it's name. I have three machines, they can't all go wrong! Here is a small bit of the quilt, note that the two islands will be moved to the correct positions soon.

Day 9 Artist in residence - natural dyes pre-mordanting

Over last weekend I pre-mordanted lots of little samples of cloth. pre-mordanting is when you soak fabric in a solution which (hopefully) will make the dye 'take' better. Plant dyes work better on protein fibres such as silk and wool and usually won't make much impact at all on cotton. if you pre-mordant cotton by soaking in soy milk you can sometimes make the plant dyes work on cotton.

I pre-mordanted small samples of cotton, wool and silk in lots of different solutions to see which worked best. Each jar has a different solution in. I used milk, soymilk, diet coke, grapefruit, lemon, soda ash, salt, vinegar, egg, liquid starch, alum. The three fabrics were joined on one side and I used a laundry marker pen to label them. They were left in the solution for 3 days then dried and then rolled up with Eucalyptus leaves (from the tree in Duncan st near Tawa Station) and tied tight with string. Then I steamed them in a pot for 6 hours and left them overnight.

The next day I opened them all out to see which of the pre-mordants gave the best 'Eco print'.

 I really didn't get much of a print on the cotton with any of the pre-mordants although soy milk at least allowed the cotton to pick up a print, even though it is nowhere near as strong as on the silk or wool.

The bundle in the bottom picture on the right is the sample soaked in egg. It gave interesting prints on all the fabric samples but it stinks of egg as I think the egg protein has cooked into the fibres. I washed it but it feels very stiff. The clearest print on the silk is the centre bottom piece which shows all the leaf detail. It was soaked in Calci-trim milk. Soy milk also was a good pre-mordant for all the different types of fabric.
In the depths of my memory I vaguely remember that you aren't supposed to use soda ash on protein fibres and I have discovered why! The wool sample that had been soaked in soda ash started to turn to jelly. Deb says the fibres were becoming 'denatured', it felt really gross and sticky although it doesn't feel as bad now it has dried.

Here is a sample page, not very scientific but pretty.

 Top left is kowhai pods with iron mordant ( made a dark green)
Top right - lichen from my apple tree with alum for a mordant. A nice orange colour.
Middle left - comfrey with alum, middle right - Ivy and alum
Bottom left - eucalytus no mordant.
Middle - the leaves of the eucalytus used to get the red.
Bottom right - pohutukawa with chunk of rusty iron for the mordant. Very black colour on wool.

Day 8 Artist in residence - natural dyes continued

Eucalptus dyes
Someone once told me that silver dollar gum tree leaves gave a good orange dye. When I tried it years ago I just got yellow. Now I have discovered why. I added alum as a mordant but I Eucalyptus does not need a mordant at all.

Here is what  we did to get this extraordinary terracotta red colour.

These were leaves from a gum tree which is near Tawa Station. It is one of those gum trees which have blue grey leaves which are short and rounded. This tree doesn't have the really round leaves of the silver dollar gum but slightly pointy leaves. Using a stainless steel pot, fill it about half way with eucalyptus leaves and then cover with water and bring to the boil. Add wool or silk and simmer for 2-3 hours. In this case the pot was taken off the boil at the end of the day and the fabric was left in the pot. It became an even stronger colour over night. I just think it is amazing!

The Eucalyptus leaves give up their colour when they are heated. Some of the other people got amazing pink prints from this tree by wrapping the leaves up in wool or silk and boiling or steaming them. The prints are quite a lolly pink - amazing from a greenish leaf.

We also tried boiling up kowhai pods. We added iron sulphate as a mordant and it dyed bits of old woolen blanket a really dark army green. You can buy iron sulphate from the garden centre. I think it is used for killing moss on lawns.

Comfrey dyed the wool bright yellow with alum as the mordant. Next time we will try using copper as (hopefully) this should give us a lighter green.

Most plants give brown or yellow so it is nice to find some that give greens and reds.
About 10 years ago Prue Townsend gave me a bag of lichen which had been in the collection of Oriel Hoskin until she died. I tried using a bit of the lichen at the time and didn't get much of a result but decided to have another go. It looks like a native New Zealand lichen called Sticta Coronata but it doesn't turn pink when acetone is dropped on it, which is a sign of Sticta C. Apparently what you do with Sticta is you boil it up and keep changing the water. You dye fabric in each change of water and as you keep going you keep getting different colours. At the moment I am still at the brown stage. See below.

 The first boiling gave me the tan colour, then I changed water, the second lot of water gave the pale beige at the top of the photo. The third change of water gave the dark brown - as the Americans say 'go figure'!
If you are trying this at home, don't use pots that you are going to cook food in, and preferably cook outside the house as the smell of eucalyptus or other plants cooking, can be quite nauseating.

Day 7 Artist in residence

I'm not doing very well at getting stuff on the blog the last 2 days. Yesterday I got asked to do another commission for an advertising agency and went into the city to discuss it with them then stayed there to look in all the bookshops and galleries as well as having a look at some of the stuff which is on for the Festival of the Arts.

Today I spent with the Whitireia students experimenting with the natural dyes but once again the fabrics are still all bundled up and won't be available till tomorrow.
We did get a nice green from boiling kowhai pods and adding ferrous sulphate (iron) and a strong rust colour from Eucalytus.

More tomorrow