Jennifer @Home

Summery Colors

When my friend Barb was here a couple of weeks ago, we made batik scarves together.  It's so much fun to have someone to work with!  Here they are drying, prior to the wax removal and final wash.  We used soft golden yellow, coral, and fuschia.  These are my favorite colors this season!

This is how mine turned out afterwards.  The daisies had just finished blooming, and I tried to capture something of them in this design.  The colors soften a good bit in the final wash. 

That seems to be the nature of cool-temp fiber reactive dyes on silk, particularly with the temperature and time adjustments needed to keep the soy wax relatively intact.  I like the soft colors, and the wax removal is so easy with soy. (You don't have to risk damaging the silk fabric, as you might removing stronger waxes.  Also, there are no paraffin fumes!)

It was great to catch up with Barb, and the kids had a great time together too --

Ok here's the dye conundrum du jour:  both of these fabrics were in the same dye bath, in preparation for the first layer of wax.  The cotton came out barely-yellow, while the silk charmeuse came out soft gold!  Apparently, the thin dye washes I use (in order to permit several layers of wax and color -- the fibers will only accept so much color) actually "take" more strongly on silk than on cotton.  More experimentation is clearly in order....  or maybe someone out there knows something about the physical/chemical properties of cotton vs. silk fibers!

Isaac Lightyear is due home today after a week with Aunt Shannon!  I asked what he wanted for dinner, thinking in terms of welcome-home-to-your-favorite-thing-mom-can-cook. 

He requested "you know, sushi, and Chinese noodles and stuff like that!" -- so I'm going to make spaghetti instead figure this one out, and head to the store soon.  In the meantime, my kitchen is begging to be returned to its former glory.  Ciao!

Late Spring Flashback

Here's a series of photos from Isaac's last soccer game of the season:

(click to see larger)

 

In order those are 1) Isaac's favorite position to play, 2) Another favorite position, 3) Not such a favorite position (that's Isaac in the middle) and 4) Awesome position, near cake!

Just this past week, Isaac participated in drama camp at BSC.  It was a b s o l u t e l y up his alley!  He had a really good time, ran and skipped all the way across campus to camp every day, and bounced all the way to the caf afterwards.  (With Isaac, the amount of bounce is directly proportional to amount of fun he is experiencing.)  Marc and I went to the final production on Friday, a creative amalgam of things the group had worked on that week.  As one of Robin Hood's merry men, Isaac the Hunter made a stew of animal tails (tiger, pig and donkey, if I remember correctly).

It being Summer, I decided I'd try some batik on cotton -- still using soy wax (so much easier to work with and clean up) -- and on a larger piece than I've ever done before, a gauzy sarong.  One of the challenges of a large piece is coming up with a design that makes sense on a larger field.  I took Collage's June theme of "Splash" and decided to go with water and sky.  On one corner I had the moon reflect on undulating water, and on the other corner, the sun shimmering across rippled water.

Here are some close-ups:

Marc's home from vestry now -- time to go hang with the fam!

High Levels of Activity

seem to be taking over lately!

Come see the neat stuff at our new hyenacart congo, called Collage!  The ladies there make so many wonderful things, and I am excited and honored to be congo-ing with such talented people.

I've posted a few of my little endeavors for the grand opening tomorrow (Monday!), several of which I also took to my first craft fair ever (the first one ever to "show" in, that is --) at the Bottletree cafe.  Last week was a flurry of last-minute scarf-batiking and I was really happy with some of the results.  Here's my little showing (you can click on any photo for a much closer-up version):

The one on the far left of the first photo, that is supposed to look like clouds, is Isaac's favorite.  He came to the craft show to help me out for a couple of hours.

In addition to scarves, I had some unexpectedly "hot" crochet items.  The bunnies (posted previously) really sold well, as did the cupcake ornaments.  The whole prospect of what sells well and what doesn't, in a given place, is in itself rather fascinating.  I really enjoyed Bottletree and hope to go back next year - with a better idea of what to bring.

Now that Bottletree is over, and Collage is about to go live, I'm going to shift gears toward getting this party together for Marc's 40th, and pulling together the Women in Music course for January Interim term.  Never a dull moment.  Eve's cutting some big multiple-pointy teeth (bicuspids, I guess?) and telling us alot about that, poor thing.

Recent Batiks

I was recently asked to take part in a Holiday Craft Bazaar at The Bottle Tree, a local café and live music venue.  Suddenly I've been in highly-productive-mode on the silk batiks I've been working with for a little while, and here are a few of my favorites:

Whirling Cosmos: in the close-ups you can see some of the cracks and veins that are a natural and wonderful result of the batik process -- where the wax cracks and some dyes bleed through.

The thing about silk batik is that you really have to use soy wax, which washes out easily (pro) but melts at a very low temperature (con) so that you must use Fiber Reactive dyes that don't require heat to set them (rather than the silk dyes that result in richer colors).  Because of this, I decided to experiment with some low-immersion techniques, to see what might happen... I like the results!  I feel that I am able to get some really rich shades, contrary to what I had first expected.  After some experiments, and determining exactly how long you can leave soy wax in contact with soda ash solution -NOT LONG AT ALL!- I ended up with a combination of techniques -- relying heavily on Joyce's Crackle Dye formula, and combining that somewhat with Dharma Trading's recipe for low-immersion dyes, and modifying both to suit the temperamental -but wonderfully non-polluting- soy wax.

Here's another one with modified-crackle-dye and several different wax layers:

Nebula

The next one is done more like a traditional batik, with washes of solid colors, working from gray to light fuschia to darker fuschia to burgundy.  The soy wax is friable enough that you really do have to re-wax previously-done areas before each new dye bath.  Even so, you get some of the wonderful cracks and veins that are part of the batik look.

Count Your Chickens

For the next one I tried mixing grays, greens, blues and reds here, crackle-dye-style, along with multiple layers of wax and I really like the effect.  An early-phase accidental wax blot decided that it wanted to evolve into a fish! 

Aquarium:

These are all done

on Habotai silk scarves,

8" x 52"

Last but not least, Isaac and I finished a Tshirt dragon batik for his faraway friend Emil.  Isaac did the design, which I adapted and waxed.  Isaac helped stir the dye -carefully- once it was well in solution.