Dyeing red

I spent a couple of days this week creating red fabric for my journal quilts.  I don't normally work in red so my stash is quite small and my aim was to create a variety of dyed pieces in different fabrics.  I haven't done any dyeing for at least two to three years.  It is one of those things that you forget the details of if you don't do it often enough.  The first hold up was that I decided I would have to mix up new soda and salt solutions.  As they have to cool, that was the first day gone.  When I then came to use them, the soda solution had gone like crushed ice.  The general view was that it was probably the weather.  Not that it is cold in the studio but I had a small quantity in a large container standing on a concrete floor.  I decided to use it anyway as by the time I discovered the problem I had mixed up all the dyes.

As I only needed small quantities I decided to go back to basics and use Helen Deighan's recipes for dyeing in a plastic bag.  http://www.crosswayspatch.co.uk/  I started with Procion dye straight out of the pot: scarlet, magenta and some rather old carmine.

I tried a lot of different fabrics including cotton, linen (an old thick tablecloth and finer stuff I bought), silk organza and cheesecloth.  I didn't have any silk habotai although later I found some!  I thought the magenta  was ghastly

 and the quantity of dye powder in the recipe meant that the colours were paler than I wanted.

The carmine pinks were OK, though, particularly as one of my ideas is related to camellias.

I did as suggested and left the wet fabric soaking overnight in a bucket of water.  This worked really well as most of the surplus dye had gone.  I had more or less given up dyeing red because it is so difficult to wash out the surplus.  When I saw that I had pinks rather than reds I decided most of it could go back in the dyebath  along with two or three pieces I had space dyed years ago but not done very well.  I added Golden Yellow to each of my original three colours and upped the amount of dye solution.  I also added some Texere threads.

And here they are in the plastic bags.

The result was three bags that all looked like the same colour!  Following the overnight in the bucket routine, things looked a bit better and I now have some lovely rich colours.  I am not sure what I am going to use the cheesecloth/muslin for yet but it has dyed really well.

I have spent the weekend learning to do hand-stitched pojagi which I am making from the silk organza.  Rather fun as I like doing very fine work.

Celebrating Diversity: Cream Tea for Two

I have spent the last few days making a 20 cm square for a Contemporary Quilt challenge on the topic of Celebrating Diversity.  The theme is Britishness/British culture.  There are a lot of stereotypes of Britishness as I well know from my time as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language forty years ago.  In those days the textbooks used to be illustrated with pictures of men wearing bowler hats, people carrying umbrellas and activities such as cricket matches.  Things have changed a great deal since then.  I started by trying to think of something that would reflect the multi-cultural nature of modern Britain but it was difficult to come up with something that I could (a) draw as a recognizable object and (b) then construct in fabric and thread.  I am not a figurative quilter so making 'real objects' is quite a challenge.

In the end I turned to British food and the diversity of regional cuisine.  From the number of food programmes on TV you would think that eating is the major preoccupation of most of the population but I was looking for something that was typical of the West Country and particularly of Cornwall.  That pointed to Cornish pasties, (boring shapes), crab (difficult to draw on a small scale) and fish, and cauliflowers.  Or cream teas which is what I settled on in the end.

Cream teas are a traditional part of West Country cooking although they vary between different counties.  The essential ingredient is clotted cream.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotted_cream  This is a particularly thick rich cream which has been made by farmers in Cornwall and Devon for hundreds of years.  My square depicts a Cornish cream tea.

You know this because the cream is on top of the jam.  In Devon the cream goes onto the scone first and then the jam.

Visitors to Cornwall always want to have a cream tea and a pasty as part of the holiday experience.  They often ask us locals if we can recommend a particular place but I have to confess that we gave up eating them years ago as we find them too rich!  Traditionally you were served two scones, homemade jam and cream along with tea.  Of course these days things are often commercialised.  In the season (Easter to September) you will find many farmers doing cream teas but sometimes the scones will have been bought from a shop or the jam is obviously factory made.  This is why people ask for recommendations.

One thing that doesn't change though and which I have tried to represent here, is the crockery.  Frequently it is made up of mismatching cups, saucers and plates in flowery and other traditional designs of the kind you would find in a charity shop or a car boot sale.  Another problem from August on can be having to share your tea with wasps especially if you are eating in someone's garden or at the beach.  I was going to put two wasps on the square but decided that it would look rather over-crowded so you will have to imagine them.  For those of you who are quilters the 'jam' is made from recycled suffolk puffs.  When I was putting away the Christmas decorations I found a sample of Suffolk puffs that I made as part of my City and Guilds course.  I decided that as they had been sitting in a box for nearly fifteen years they could have a new use.  As I had not sewn them to a backing it was quite a simple task to detach the smallest ones although looking at them now, I wonder how I ever managed to make such small ones.  The 'cream' is thick thread crunched up.

Now that I have finished this square I am going to start working on my Journal Quilts.  After a year off I decided I missed not having any goals and deadlines so I have enrolled for 2012.  I also plan to make them on my new Bernina 350PE which I have just bought, really as a second machine that I can keep in the house and because my Artista is now twelve years old and very heavy.  More on this later.

Photo of the Day

Another study in rust.

Photo of the day

Teasels: to be found all over Penwith in the autumn, they make good dried flower arrangements for the winter.

Photo of the Day

We have plenty of old iron down here.  This is part of a rusty ship.

Photo of the day

Statue in memory of fishermen who have died at sea.  This was put up about three years ago on the approach to Newlyn.  People were concerned that there was no memorial to fishermen.  The seaman is standing on a gyroscope.

Photo of the day

It is quite warm here today although very wet so amazing to remember that exactly a year ago we had really heavy (for Cornwall) snow. Here is a photo of a neighbour's agapanthus that I took on 2 December 2010.

Tomorrow I will see what the plant looks like a year on.  It is possible that there aren't any seedheads because the woman who lived in this house died at the beginning of 2011 and some professional gardeners now live there.  They may have chosen to chop the seedheads off.