Some Non-Whale Stuff

 There hasn't been much progress on the whale over the past couple of days. Hopefully the anchor points for the pulley system will be installed tomorrow, which will mean that work on the skeleton can continue!

So, without an update on the whale, I thought I'd do a post about some other stuff that I've undertaken this term. In addition to knitting, I'm also majoring in weaving and print & dye. I majored in apparel construction last year, so a lot of my work is apparel-based.

One of my print and dye projects that's currently in the works is a dress that's going to be constructed from silk and dyed with natural dyes (I'm all about silk, wool, and natural dyes). It will probably end up looking something like this:

I wanted do dye the skirt using a resist technique called 'arashi'. I've never used this technique in a dress before, and I wasn't sure what colours I'd want to use, so the first step was to do some sampling. So, I took a couple pieces of silk and dyed each of them in a colour I thought I might want to use as the base colour for the fabric.

The piece on the left has been dyed with marigold and iron, and the piece on the right with cutch extract and iron.

Arashi is a technique that involves wrapping a piece of fabric around a pole, tightly wrapping string around that, and then scrunching the fabric up so there are pleats in it. When you top-dye it, the string and folds in the fabric resist the second dye colour.

Post-scrunching, ready to dye!

I decided that instead of just having two colours in my fabric, I wanted to have several. So instead of top-dying these samples by dipping the whole thing in a dye vat, I sprinkled a few different dyes in their dry form right onto the scrunched fabric.

Then I wrapped them all up in plastic wrap and let them sit overnight. The next day I steamed them to set the dyes. After rinsing and drying, this was the final result!

This was the sample I was happiest with... It's the one who's base colour was cutch and iron. For the actual piece of fabric I'll be using in the dress, I'll use the same dyes and techniques and try and recreate this sample as best I can. The nature of the arashi and sprinkle dye techniques means that I'll never be able to get it exactly the same, but I'm fairly confident that I'll end up with something I like.