German Brickwork Embroidery

Ever since I dyed some of my silk tram, I’ve been thinking that I should do some brickwork embroidery. The long parallel stitches really show how beautiful the shine of the silk can be. I didn’t want to do a pouch, though. Everyone does pouches, and while I’m okay with that, I wanted to do something different. Enter Helene, who reminded me of a saint-themed event that was coming up, and suggested I make a reliquary box like this one from  Medieval Arts & Crafts. She was also kind enough to suggest one of the patterns she charted, that was suitable for something horizontal, like the sides of a box.

Gold silk finished

I chose to use the cochineal (incidentally, my dyeing source says that the reason the cochineal turned out so dark-purple was that it must have leeched out some of the iron from the jar lid), onion-skin, and undyed silk for the colors. I ran out of the purple and decided to finish it off with some teal-ish silk I made by over dyeing indigo with onion-skin.
Just ran out of purple silk

The finished embroidery. Next time, putting the box together.
Reliquary Box Reliquary Box Reliquary Box

Indigo Dyeing, take two

Remember my indigo dyeing adventure last time? And how it didn’t turn out so well for my cotton yarn? Well, after I got it all untangled, I decided to bite the bullet and dye it again. Of course my hands turned blue again…

Oh Loki-hands, I missed you.

But I got a darker yarn. Here you can see the difference in the first dye-bath blue (the tiny skein), and the second dye-bath blue (the large skeins).
Indigo yarn, second dyeing. I kept a sample from the first dyeing for comparison. It's probably even a bit darker than it shows here.

This picture is much more color accurate, and shows the blue and natural cottons next to each other. They look really beautiful and vibrant together. 
A better sense of the depth of the indigo. Next to the undyed yarn.

Natural Dying, uh, Dyeing Symposium

I finally processed all the pictures from the Natural Dying symposium I went to in September. Somehow, I thought I’d done it already. Better late than never, I suppose.

Dying Extravaganza

Mordanted fabric strips and threads. We used strips of cotton and linen fabric, and wool and silk embroidery threads, so see how each material took the dyes. A bajilliopn pictures after the jump.

Continue reading