Shoulders (knees and toes, knees and toes...)

Remember all those beautiful flowers I made yesterday?  I sewed them all onto a little shoulder shape I made and can start making my final one now!

Then I decided to be a good friend and help one of the girls dye a dress for Hallowe'en (we're dead Hollywood stars, Marylin Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Rita Hayworth!) but it was polyester so wouldn't dye, we did mention this to her. I think I need new gloves for when I dye, mine don't seem to be doing so well...

(The flash took a lot of the mouldy/dead look out of my fingers, they looked like when Dumbledore had put on the cursed Horcrux ring!)

#flowers #neckpiece #Halloween #Hollywood #dye #harrypotter

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

It's off to sew we go...
Spent yesterday dyeing and today sewing, what fun. I've been playing with Organza, Chiffon and Crepe de Chine and these are some of the beautiful colours I've come up with...

Except I found out after I'd spent all day sewing these wings that chiffon sort of shrinks and wont stretch back into the proper shape no matter how hard you try.

Hopefully the organza will work better.

Changed my mind, hate it again.

See, I'm just too fickle for this course.

Well, I've spent the last 2 days in the print room being a good girl and printing some samples on fabric and carefully hand painting them so they looked beautiful and I showed my tutor and she told me to steam, wash and iron them so they were fixed and I did and look what happened...

This one isn't too bad - just a few green spots everywhere so I might be able to salvage that but it gets worse...

 The entire background of this one has gone from very white to pink with a hint of purple and blue

I think this one kind of speaks for itsself.

Turns out that if you dont mix the dyes with manutex or indalca they do that when they've been steamed and washed.
If I'm honest I'm glad I found out that it happens now and can do something about it than it happening on my final piece and not knowing what to do. Although, I'd rather it didn't actually do that but if it has to...

First final print!

And, I've done a print for my final collection! How organised am I :)  (I'm just not mentioning that some people have got loads more prints done that I think look better so shhhh) All the fabrics I dyed today came out really pale so I've decided that can be my theme and if we had to name our collections my print one would be 'Dream a Little Dream of Me' cos the colours are all blues/purples and they look all dream-like.

This one turned out so much paler that I thought it would and my camera - awesome though it is - couldn't focus on it cos everything was so pale! So I've just got a few close ups to give you the general impression. I dyed the fabric Bright Blue (but it came out pale purple...?) and printed with discharge, steamed it to fix, then printed with blue procion paste and steamed to fix. And somehow I was at college till 9pm doing this... Not entirely sure how it took about 8 hours but still, I quite like it :)

The end is in sight...

My third and nearly final embroidery sample! The little cup at the bottom took me forever to do cos it's all hand sewn and I wanted to cry after I bondawebbed the leaf on cos the iron made an awful mark on it but it's not that noticable any more so yey. Don't have much to do on my other one either so that can be on here soon...

Print part one

Tra laaa... The print samples are dry and ironed (even though some don't look it, I don't think I let the iron heat up enough, I was too excited :) ) and here are some pics of my first attempt at printing!

  

This is an Acid dye (I think it was called Lemon Yellow...?) printed on a silk. It probably wasn't the best idea since you cant really see it on the white so I did some close ups for you of the best bits.

This is a Procion dye (Claret Red, very nice name) on a heavy cotton. This has come out a lot darker which is nice. Note to Self, dont use Yellow on White :)

These are Discharge Prints, you print onto already dyed fabric and the colour gets leaked out - like bleaching. I think the colour turned funny in some places - like my leaf on the black piece - because I didn't wash it out well enough (whops) but I really like the effect it left.

Applique and whatnots :)

We've been doing some applique which was quite fun but also quite stressful when we were doing reverse and shadow applique and I had to cut stuff away, aaah! I was so worried that I was going to cut through my stitching when I was doing that.

The first pic is normal applique and reverse applique, and the second pic is shadow applique. I really liked that one cos I used a sparkly silver thread and it looks all Christmassy! It doesn't really look it in the pic but it makes me smile :)

We also had a play with dyes. The top row are calico samples that I dyed and the bottom are silks that I dyed. Believe it or not but the corresponding samples have actually been dyed the same colours...

And, I found a nice new stitch - the cloud stitch, oooh...