ketchup. pt. 2

managing the pictures in the last post was getting to be a pain so i split it in two. i saved the veils i have made and some little cross stitch pieces i did for here. here is the finished veil that i made for my friend ginas wedding, it is made with soysilk and dyed with lichens, made using both knitting and crochet. i made two more veils, both out of Bombyx silk, which is silk that comes from domesticated silk worms and has a more pure white color and they are both crocheted. i really like the honeycomb one, but most people seem to like the other one, which i was thinking of glaciers when i made it. there is a variety of cross stitch mostly i made to practice.

A long overdue catching up. pt. 1

its been far too long since i have written so now i need to do a little catching up. although i haven't been blogging much i am ever busy spinning and making things, and of course working the day job at the waxworks. unfortunately i know i don't have pictures of everything i have made but i think i got most of the coolest stuff.
this grey bag i made mostly for going to the park with, it is big enough to hold a large paper back plus your stuff, and maybe even a hard back, with a long shoulder strap the top of the bag hangs at the waist. (and theres my foot! my tatt's still looking good after fourteen years!)
Next up is this shawl/wrap. as you can see it turned out quite large, and i was happy with the array of colors that i got, including the black.

i really got into making stuffed animals for awhile also, this was one of my first attempts, i think the stitches are too big, but i think i improved.

these two little guys were alot of fun to make and i liked how they turned out, the round bodies and weird long beaks. the dark garnet-y red color is difficult to get, it takes quite a bit of dyestuff and various tinkering with the chemistry of the dye pot.
the Quadcerepus to the right took me a long time to make, with eight tentacles and four horns, i used wool, silk, cotton and alpaca. the black is naturally colored alpaca, the lilac portion of the body is cotton, the light blue curled horn and the dark purple curled horn(in back) are both silk.






with these two i was exploring using recyled leather as well as my yarn, and i really liked the result, but i found the leather very hard to sew, i may pursue more explorations with it in the future.

Hats. Hats, Hats, Hats, Hats, Hats.

So here they are! i know i've told a lot of you about my horned hats, and now i finally have some of them finished for everyone to see! sorry for the scowly face i was concentrating hard on positioning the camera.

To Know A Veil

My friend and Co-Worker Gina is getting married at the end of summer, so i am making her a veil to wear for her wedding. It will just cover the top of her head and go down her back to cover her hair, she didn't want anything over her face. so i have been spinning soysilk pretty fine and then using these HUGE knitting needles, it's pretty cool, and it will look great when it's finished. i crocheted the top part.

The Big D

I took my camera to work the other day so that i could finally show everyone where it is that i spend most of my days! for those of you who don't know, i work at The Big Dipper Wax Works where we make beeswax candles, and at the start of the year had a fire. so ever since then we have been working in these

they are called Mobile Mini trailers. one of them is finished on the inside and has windows, that is where the candles are being made and labled/packaged.















but i spend most of my time in the shipping trailer, where i pack up orders to be sent out. i actually do alot more than that, all over the place, but that is mainly what my job is supposed to be.and then there are two of our lovlier outdoor areas, the first we call Barlows Office














and then there is Jo's Office

Where is the Tin Man?

last weekend, on friday to be precise, i went to the public library to poke around and check out their fiber arts books. i Love the library, especially the downtown branch here in seattle, it is just so nice and open, and the librarians were very friendly and helpful. one mission i had was that i wanted to find books on dyeing so that i could better educate myself and hopefully get some better reds out of my dyes. i think i may be on the trail to a solution, quite literally. one book i found talked about using both copper and iron as a way to cause color shifts in your dyeing, i had hear about this before but always had the impression you had to use some fairly nasty chemicals to do so. this book said to just soak copper or iron in a mixture of equal parts vinegar and water, until the liquid changed color. that was a process i was much more comfortable with. then i came across a book that is called "The Red Dyes" and it says in regards to using both madder and cochineal, that a tin solution was added to make it dye scarlet. the tin solution that i read about though was tin dissolved in hydrochloric acid and nitric acid. neither of which sound like i really want them in my kitchen. so i decided to try soaking tin in the vinegar mix for an experiment. i ran to Value Village to paw through the kitchen wares. i picked out two pie pans that i thought might be tin, but that was when i realized i didn't really know how to tell tin from aluminum from steel even. i think tin is less porous, and is magnetic, and is light weight, and i'm not sure about if it rusts or oxidizes in some other way. if anyone knows anything about the identification of tin, please let me know.!

The Blue

i only had one skein left to spin to finish off this project, the lone blue. even though it was only one skein to spin, i was dying six. the three variegated, the green, the purple, and the blue. to get the blue color i used indigo which is a fun dye to use because of the procedures needed to dye with it, and you have to dip and re-dip the skeins to darken the color. but after, WHEW!, it felt good to have it all done.

The Reds

i struggle for reds, but still they elude me. red seems to be one of the most precocious colors in the spectrum, and i have yet to get a good solid true red. i have been using Madder root and Cochineal, and have got a wide variety of pinks, fuscia, even a dark garnet, but nothing that is like brick red, or blood red. one book i have talks about what used to be called Turkish Red which it says is the red used in gingham, but it only vaguely describes a forty day process of dying and mordanting to obtain the fugitive color. so although the red i got was not what i had envisioned, i settled for it, because hey, it's pretty anyway. so i had spun up three more skeins, so for my dyepot of madder and cochineal combined, i had one skein for 'red' that turned out more of a mauve, one for a purple that turned out a great plum, one for a blue/purple, then one solid yellow for an 'orange' that turned out more of a rose, and the 1/3'd yellow dyed for the blue/green/purple.