TULIPS

Just listed this beautiful transcolor wool for sale on Ebay. It is called Tulips and was dyed using a transcolor method on top of the stove. Here's what I did:

Scrunched a piece of wet wool in very little water in a great big enamel pan that stretches over two burners of the stove. Mixed up three formulas. Starting with the lightest, I poured the formula over the top third of the wool. I repeated with the other formulas being sure not to create a line between formulas. Scrunched the wool well to get the dye into the peaks and valleys all the while trying not to allow the formulas to merge too much. A little blending is good!

Once that was finished, I added some water and simmered for about a half hour.

Et voila!


Here's the link to the Ebay auction if you are interested in this wool: tulips

Dye Workshop on Wednesday

Tomorrow I'm hosting the Loopy Ladies rug hooking group for a day of dyeing!! Can't wait to get into the dyepots. I figured out the formulas and colors I wanted to use last week, and this afternoon, I divided all the wool up for the various projects.

We're going to do: marbelizing, abrash, watercolor abrash, pancake dye, dip dye, and transcolor dyeing. I'm hoping we get to all the techniques I've mentioned, but a lot will depend on the time and weather. It's supposed to be a in the high 70s which will be so much better than the oppressive heat of last week. Here are some photos of my prep work.

This wool will be abrashed with a formula called Minerals. It uses 5 different textures/shades. One of my favorites.

The following two photos show wool that is going to be pancake dyed using two different formulas.


The rolls of wool in the next photo will be marbelized. I haven't bundled them up and tied them yet as I want the ladies to see how this is done.


The wool for the other methods are not pictured as the formulas use natural wool. I'll be taking photos of the dye day and the finished wool to post Thursday.

My House rug

While I put the finishing loops into the border of my New York Beauty rug, I also began working on my next project. I took several photos of my childhood home and from those photos started a design for my next rug.

Here's the photo I used for the starting point.


I created a document in Adobe Illustrator and placed this photo in the background layer. Cropped it a bit and zoomed in. After that I traced what I wanted using the pen tool. Really roughed it in, so a lot of the lines aren't as smooth as they will wind up being. I also removed the tree and the deck from the photo as they were not there when I lived in the house.

Here is the line drawing I got:

Next step trace with better lines and then scan the image. Once the image is scanned, I'll resize to 24" x 18".

Next posting will show you some of the materials I've gathered for this rug.