Art Shack Underway...or

How I spent Canada Day, Independance Day, and my Birthday week.
I have come across several posts recently from fellow surface designers about how dyeing in hot humid summer months produces superior results i.e. better dye exhaustion and deeper colours. MX procion dyes are cold water dyes in name only... what they really really really want to quote the Spice Girls is an ambient temperature between 70 and 90 degrees (20 -25 C). That translates well for southern Ontario's hot humid summer weather that we regularly try to escape from with modern air conditioning.
So I went dockside and took another look at our neglected storage shed. I saw its future as a hot wet studio for the summer months. It had 'Art Shack' written all over it!
In its glory days, this shed/shack was a pre-war cottage built on a narrow ledge giving out onto the St Lawrence River. It had a kitchen, a bathroom, electricity and running water. Sadly, all this was removed except for the structure when we built our home (zoning laws).

I started with an exterior paint job, and spruced up the windows and their screens.
Here is an interior shot. Some of these windows have screens that open up, letting in gentle breezes off the water. I know my fabric will be very happy, but some of this furniture has to go.

Meanwhile, I painted, painted, painted. The old fridge might have been useful for storing dyes but it is an energy guzzler (the door doesn't close all that well) so its gotta go too. The pot belly stove has been disconnected and is too heavy to move, so it stays...an elegant reminder of bygone times.
I removed huge amounts of red indoor-outdoor carpeting along with its rotten under-padding, yuck. The carpet had been glued to tintest (?) that had been nailed to a layer of battleship linoleum...nails spaced every 4 to 6 inches apart (ugh!). What lay underneath were beautiful pine floor boards, painted deep yellow and green - how eccentric. I wonder when it was that deep yellow floor paint was fashionable?

Given that this will be a working studio and I will be dripping fabric paint and dyes, I don't plan to do a major floor-sanding job. Just enough to keep the floor very clean and functional for the fabric. I really don't mind the distressed look.

That's it for now. I'll keep you posted on progress as the summer unfolds.

Rubber "opera gloves" for the dye lab - finally!

Look at these -- I finally found 23" long latex rubber gloves - long enough to reach the drain at the bottom of a laundry tub that is full of cold brackish dye water... they are called Elbow-length Mucking Gloves (they go past your elbow) and can be bought on-line from Lee Valley Tools for $7.95 Cdn.
Item no. BL650. BTW they will send you a wonderful gardening catalogue at the same time - free.








I finished up the 12 metres of tray dyed fabric. Honestly most of them needed a couple of tray treatments plus a third pass of LWI overdyeing before I was satisfied with them. Here are six lengths washed, ironed and ready to be cut up.





Here is one opened up. Yeah, I guess it's OK.

Tray Dye Results

A couple of days ago I posted some shots of fabric in the tray. This is a technique described by Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn in their book on Tray Dyeing.
Here are a couple of shots of fabric lengths that are quite eye-popping.







I have 12 metres of tray dyed fabric so some of them need to be toned down with a LWI bath. This will murk up the colours and give me some deep down dark tones, the ones I love.

Will post results in a couple of days. great technique but somewhat time consuming - then again anything really worthwhile is time consuming (grin).

New take on tray dyeing

This pic to the left shows 4 metres of gorgeous PFD cotton that was tightly pleated against itself, liberally squirted with procion MX dyes and was left to cure overnight. The wait was worth it. Right now the length is slopping around in the washing machine with some synthrapol.



While in San Antonio last February, I came across Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn's book on Tray Dyeing. I thought that there was nothing new to learn about tray dyeing, but I was wrong.

To get really deep colours and rich textures, I had overlooked the importance of tightly pleating or scrunching the fabric in the tray; AND the importance of using salt (good ol' NaCl) and lots of it!
forget ludigol, urea or calgon...lots of salt.
Oh yeah, and generous portions of sodium carbonnate (ash) for the pre-soak.

To quote Leslie "we've tested dyeing with and without salt and in our minds, there's no question that salt makes a difference to getting a decent strike.
As salt is cheaper than dye, we choose to use it."

Needless to say, I am back on the salt bandwagon, specially for direct application techniques like tray dyeing. These results are gorgeous!

On a completely different topic, I just finished two weekends of open house studio tours. For the tour, I made up some 15+ small colour studies from bits and snippets of hand dyed fabric that were lying around. In many cases, I added a bit of hand stitching. This turned out to be a good idea as they were very popular, and most sold. These are the only four I have left. Worth repeating I think.