Rust Dyeing Is So Much FUN!!

So so pleased to finally be here! The Easter holidays!! It is been a busy but fun packed term with lots of highs and a few lows. Really looking forward to having some quality time with my little people and getting out an about over the next couple of weeks. Last half term holiday was filled with sickness bugs and illness so I am making up for lost time this holiday. Can not wait!!

I have been playing again. This time with rust! I hadn't tried this before either so new experiences too. A couple of weeks ago I helped to organise a workshop at school with two local textile artists, Sue Cranwell and Madelaine Nightingale who are lovely lovely ladies with the most incredible talent, knowledge and skill. They really are an inspiration and luckily for us very happy to share their knowledge and experience. They demonstrated how to rust dye and bag dye with Procion dyes during the workshop. Since then I have been on a constant look out for rusty objects and rooting through my fabric stash again to select bits and bobs for dyeing. It has proved to be really addictive...

Rust dyeing is very easy too. Everything you need, if you're anything like me, is either in your garden, shed or garage and in your kitchen. A few rusty items, old tools, washers, screws and nails, bits of rusty old tin that can be broken into tiny fragments, vinegar and tea. We used fruit tea as well. Anything acidic will do.

We experimented with rust dyeing on paper and fabrics. The image below was achieved using wire wool placed on paper then painted with tea. The photo doesn't really do it justice but up close you can see tiny hair like dye marks on the paper from the fragments of wire wool that scattered as I was working with to separating the fibres (if you can call them that) to create a fine mesh to lay on the paper.

Next was placing rusty items onto paper and painting them with fruit tea to make prints.... I left these for a couple of days. Quite pleased with the outcome.

This is dyeing with cranberry and orange fruit tea. I wrapped fabrics around a rusty old saw blade and tied them up. Then painted the whole thing with fruit tea. The fabric that was more absorbent achieved the better results. It is all about making marks and pretty hard to predict exactly what mark you will achieve. The best part is seeing the results at the end. This was the before...

And this was the after... The lovely cerise colour turns a blueberry before it finally turns grey. Some interesting marks on this piece and it would make a great background for future work, plus I love the colours.

Here are some of the most successful pieces I have made. This one was dyed with tea. Lovely Hubby went out and got me some value tea bags from Tesco for 90p. I used about 4-5 tea bags in a measuring jug half full of boiling water and stewed for a while.  I was really pleased with this one. I roughly wrapped the fabric around an old garden tool and tied it up well. Then painted the whole piece with tea. 

Here is another fruit tea dyed piece... I am having ideas about this one, layering print with hand stitch and perhaps a bit of applique. It looks quite like a landscape already. 

Dying with vinegar here achieves the wonderful orange and brown marks. Vinegar dyed shibori with screws on silk.

 Tea dyed shibori with screws on cotton, worked really well. 

And here is a lovely new pile of fabrics waiting to be printed during the next workshop. 

I am starting to build up a huge stash of these dyed fabrics. I would love to create something with them. Still feeling inspired by what I saw at the Textiles In Focus exhibition. I am thinking I might have to start playing with ideas. Have an evening on my sewing machine or play with some print ideas and see what we get. They are such lovely pieces I will need to be very brave to chop, print, collage, stitch or even over dye to build up some ideas for turning these into something.

Thank you for coming by. Have a wonderful Easter break everyone!!

:0) xxx