Altered altoid tins, 2nd Saturday club

This month, our 2nd Saturday Art Club got together on 3rd Sunday instead.  We altered tins (altoid and other tins). We had a great time as usual!

Here is Laurie and her round tin and the start of a house assemblage. Susan had wood house shapes to share, which I loved!

 

Here is the start of Sabyl's tin. 

Susan and her "lady". I love the metal faucet handle thing on top.

Here are Enid and Trisha working on their pieces.

Enid's faces.

Trisha's Van Gogh inspired sea scape.

 
Newcomer Liz is working on her tin. She had papered it, then had technical difficulties. I think she still enjoyed the camaraderie and craziness that is 2nd Saturday group!

Here is a piece I have in progress. I still need to glue everything down and I have a decorative piece for the top of the tin.

Here is the piece I made with Susan's house shape. The kid photos are me and my sister. The transparency in the tin is our childhood house in Toledo, OH. The bottom portion is a Diet Coke can that I ran through my die cutting machine with an embossing plate (Tim Holtz plate, I believe) and inked with Staz On.

It was a fun time, and we stayed for over five hours! A great way to spend a day!

Snow dyeing fabric to create circle designs

There are some blogs that I read on a weekly basis and when I was cruising blogs last week I saw this great idea on Carol R Eaton's blog. She is rubber banding items in her fabrics and then snow dyeing them.  I love the circle design she got with the wiffle balls. We had a bit of snow last week so I tried it out.

I had a bunch of styrofoam balls for another project. I also had some balls I made from aluminum foil (not perfectly round, but round enough). 

I did one large fabric with larger balls.

And a smaller piece of fabric with smaller balls.

Of course I throw on a couple other fabrics while I'm at it.

Here comes the snow!

With dyes added. I just sprinkled them on and was probably too heavy handed.

After the snow melted.

Close up.

 Here is the fabric that had the smaller balls.  I think it turned out great and plan to make it a field of flowers.

 Here is the one made with the larger balls. I think I should have wrapped the rubber bands a bit tighter around some of the balls as there are areas with no pattern.

 Close up.

This piece I just twisted and kind of rolled up (no balls).

This is a piece I just scrunched and laid across the whole screen, so it got warm and cool colors (no balls).

I love this portion and think it looks like trees. I can't decide whether to cut this section out or leave in the green and red area that is above to have it be more abstract. What do you think?

 I also dyed some cheesecloth as well.

I really enjoy snow dyeing as it is very easy. It was nice that I could do it outside as it was 60 degrees the day after the snow. I have some fiber projects to work on today and hope to have an interesting project done by Friday for posting.

Wet-felted house and trees

 I took this picture the other day of a house in the neighborhood. I liked the way the trees framed the house. I also like the simplicity of it. I decided to do this picture in felt, and will put leaves on the trees since summer is on the way (never mind that we may get 12" of snow on Saturday).

I used white as my base. I then added a medium blue for the top sky and a light blue towards the bottom. I did use some hand carders to make a blend of the two colors for the transition. I basically used my white base layers for the house.

Here I have added the tree trunks and branches, the sidewalk, grass, and door.

For the leaves, I took many colors of green roving and cut them in tiny pieces over the trees to make the leaves.  Leaves are dark green wool, grass green wool, grass green bamboo, yellow green wool, bright green bamboo, light green bamboo, and light green wool.

 

Here it is after it is felted and I pinned it on a board to dry. I will post another picture when it is dry, as the colors should lighten up.  The house at this stage reminds me of a beehive, since the sides are curved.

This photo is after it had dried. I plan to add details, trims, windows, more leaves, etc., with needle felting.

Wet-felted poppies

I decided to wet felt some poppies. We get giant poppies in our yard that are vibrant orange and almost as big as my head.

Here is before felting. I had dark green leaves in the background and additional grass green leaves on top of those. I originally only had the flowers but it looked too bottom heavy so I added the flower bud.

 I used white felt as my base, and that was a mistake as I now have a ton of white fuzzies on the entire surface. (This may be due to the type of white wool I used, which was quite coarse). I will add some needle felting to cover that up, as well as add some machine stitching to bring out the details and add more contrast.  I like the ragged edges on this one.

Adding needle felting to a wet felted piece

   
I had made this wet felted piece about a month ago, and I thought the black branches were to dominant. In order to help the piece, I decided to add some other  branches to the background. I printed a black and white copy of the image and played with where the branches would be.

Please note, that I did re-wet and re-roll this piece to help remove some of the ripples, and let it dry prior to needle felting.

Here I am auditioning some colors for the branches. A light green and a brown is on the left, a grass green and yellow-green is on the right. I went with the light green on the left.

Here is the piece with the added background branches. I think they may be a touch dark, but I plan to add more details to the flowers so I hope that will help bring the flowers into focus. I did needle felt some yellow-green bamboo fibers around some of the cherry blossoms. I also straightened some of the curves in the main branch and needle felted some more black towards the center of the branch where it was a bit thin.  I then backed this with an iron-on interfacing in order to do some machine and hand stitching.

Dyeing a wool sweater for an art project

I have been wanting to make a 3D assemblage using a blue wool sweater. I planned to felt the sweater so it needed to be pretty big so it would look "regular size" after felting.  I could not find a sweater that would work, they were too small, not the right blue, etc.  I finally found one I thought was the appropriate size, and decided to try to dye it. This was a while ago, and I forget what I did, but instead of a nice blue sweater, with was muddy blue with blotchy gray spots. Recently, since I still did not find a new sweater that would work, I thought I would try to fix the dye job on the one I had. 

I did not expect good results so I didn't take any pictures before or during the process. First, I soaked the sweater in water, and wrung it out (I did not want any dry spots, so the remover would work uniformly). I made a bucket of Rit Color Remover outside (it is stinky stuff). I just used one packet of color remover and about one and half large steamer pots of boiling water.  Boiling water and wool typically is a bad thing, but I plan to felt the sweater so I am not concerned about it felting/shrinking. I let it sit in there for about an hour, then rinsed the sweater in the tub in the tub. The sweater was now roughly a heathered oatmeal color.

For the dyeing, I made a batch of about 1/2 tsp of Jacquard acid dye Turquoise in a big pot of water (pot is for crafting only, not cooking). I have been using too much dye powder in all my previous acid dyes so I only used 1/2 tsp as I did not want a dark sweater.  I cooked it on the stove for about a half an hour.  When I took it out is was more greenish than blueish. So I made another pot of dye, this time using Sapphire blue. I heated the dye pot on the stove and when it was hot, I took it off the stove and set it in the kitchen sink. I then dipped the sweater in the dye pot. . I would dip about 3/4 of the sweater in the dye and lift it partially out again.  I did leave about 1/2 the sweater in there it sit for a bit.  I did this dunking a few times, then I left about five inches of the sweater in the dye pot (for maybe a half hour?).

I got a great ombre affect, the very top of the sweater is still the greenish color from the turquoise bath, and then it goes into a medium toned Sapphire.

I hung it on the line to dry that is why it has a line across it. I plan on washing it on hot in the wash machine so it will felt a little more and to rinse out any extra dye. I sewed one sleeve to the sweater body with wool, as this is part of the art piece I want to make.

Nuno felting, my work-around

In my last post, I tried nuno felting but I think my silk was too tight a weave to get it to work right.

I refuse to let the silk "win", so I used my trusty felting machine and machine felted the heck out of it. Take that, silk. I win!

I really wanted the silk to get kind of scrunchy, so I soaked the project in hot water and "fulled" it. In felting terms, I wrung out some of the water, then dropped/threw it in the (empty) kitchen sink quite a bit to help make the wool shrink. I win again!

It may not be perfect. I would definitely do things differently next time, but I was thrilled for it to be almost what I envisioned in the beginning. And I may short cut with the felting machine on another wet felting project I have in mind, too!