Last night, in my rush to have a piece of dyed fabric to work with today, I brewed up some tea in the urn and threw in a big piece of silk. Unfortunately, I didn’t really think through how much dyestuff I was using compared to the amount of fabric – and the answer turned out to be not nearly enough.
The silk had been in the tea urn all night, but you can see that it came out almost exactly the same colour as it went in. The very weak colour of the dye solution is another clue that it simply wasn’t going to work!
As I was emptying the tea urn into the bath I cleverly managed to kick the spout, which poured scalding water all over the top of my foot. Not my best move ever. It damn well hurts, and I don’t quite know how I’m going to put shoes on to go to work tomorrow. (I don’t have any ballet flats, all my shoes fasten over the instep. Ouch.)
This is the finished colour of the fabric – almost exactly the same as before I started. It does have some rather nice iron stains (an experiment in modifying the dye with rusty nails), but they’re so spread out that they just look like a bit of an accident. Perhaps another dip in the tea urn with a darker dye will make them look a bit more purposeful. You can see below that the fabric has changed colour a little bit… but it’s far, far too subtle for my liking!
I do this often – not the dropping scalding water on my foot, thank goodness, but the mad rush to have something prepared for my one day off during the week. Once a month there’s an odd junction in my work rota where I work all weekend and don’t get two days off in a row that week. My following day off always seems extremely precious (and a long away away from the previous one, even though it isn’t really), and I invariably put too much pressure on myself to get lots of creative work done that day. Sometimes that pressure works really well and I get lots of sewing done (such as the orange jacket I made on Thursday and wore to work on Friday), but sometimes… well, sometimes you get days like today.
The house move is panicking me too, as my new sewing room is also going to be the box room until we can get some flooring put down in the loft, so I don’t know how long it’ll be until I can get everything unpacked. Thankfully my knitting will remain accessible (it’s currently squashed into the storage end of the sofa), and I’ve packed myself an Emergency Craft Box. This contains lots of embroidery, plenty of sketching materials, and lots of small bits and pieces that I never seem to get around to. I might just pop a few bits of needle felting kit in there too. I may not get around to making use of any of it, in all the disruption of the move. But it makes me feel much calmer about it all to know that if I want to, I can.
