Category — Fabric

Spring fever is in the air! While I’m busy sweating over some spring cleaning, this is your chance to get your own hot little hands on this fiery, passionate four yard beauty. It’s up for auction on eBay, plain and simple.

Sorry the posts are so short, but Wordpress is still wonky for me. If you click on the image, it will bring you straight there.

Heck, yes … look at that. This is just a quick pic, but the colours really are that insane. I wish my mannequin was a little wider too so that I could show this off properly, but it will have to do for now. Bambi needs a more substantial twin sister. I haven’t measured it yet since dyeing and washing, but it was about a size 16-18 when I started with it. I’m guessing that it’s about a 14-16 now after some scorching hot washing.

Mine, all mine. Nighties and slips shouldn’t make you want to yawn from the visual boredom. I’m going to experiment with a few more, doing something a little more complex. Charmeuse is to dye for. Pun intented.

Well, I don’t. This was just a day where everything seemed to flow towards mysterious shades of blue, lilac and violet. Lets not forget black either, my favourite foil against just about any colour.

I’m just about done cleaning out the odds and ends … or so I thought. I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to bother working with 5 momme silk anymore — it’s pretty, but much too flimsy for my taste — but what do you know? I find 65 (!) yards of it that I didn’t think I had. Good grief. How, may you ask, does one not know that they have 65 yards of something laying about? I asked myself that, but I found no answer. What’s even worse is that it’s 54 inches wide. I have absolutely no intention of making half circles out of this stuff, so that also means that I must cut it down to 45″ wide and then hem all four sides. I’ve mastered the perfect hem, but this is still a pain in the you-know-where.

So there’s going to be another batch of 5 momme veils coming up, whether I like it or not. Such as this little pretty :

Pretty, yes. But not like this:

It’s particularly nice if you’re going to dye something black that it has that extra substance that 6 momme has for the dyes to bite into. No iffy black. Real black.

You can’t deny the fact that eBay is a wonderful marketplace. As an artist, if you want to launch yourself into the world at large, there is nothing quite like it.

You can think what you will, but it’s a fantastic place to shop too: the world is virtually at your finger tips. If you’re lucky — and sometimes patient — you can find something like this:

That, ladies and gentlemen, if you can’t already identify the artist, is a pile of scarves by Carter Smith. Yes, I’m a Carter Smith nut. I have a piece of chiffon that he helped me twist just the right way at a workshop that I’ve been keeping safe like it’s the Shroud of Turin. I can’t afford the “K” dress that I lust after in my dreams, but I’ve been watching for anything that I can get my hands on within my price range.

These aren’t much fabric really. Only one is really big enough to be used as a real scarf, but at least that one is what I currently think of as classic Carter. There’s a piece of habotai that’s not much to look at but it’s actually signed and dated from 1987, a piece in the strangest Easter egg colours, a small triangle in what I call his “Savanah” phase, and two swatches of classic pop art Carter. I’m glad the only one that’s useful to wear is of the pop art variety: for the knowing, you can tell it’s Carter Smith from a mile and they’re my colours to boot. I bought these off a gallery owner who was a collector through the years so I figure I now own a small 20 year anthology of his work.

I’m giddy like a school girl.

I must admit that I intensely like to dye just for the joy of it. No plan, no rules, no costume matchy-match. Just me, a piece of fabric and seeing what surprises the Goddess that expresses herself through my hands has in store for me today. I rarely get to dye this way — a lot of clients have a pretty set image in their heads of what they want — so I’m usually stuck inside a very limited set of rules.

There should be no rules.

(look Mom, no rules! handsomely ugly mess too)

Rules are an unfortunate side effect of having an already established niche market and clientele to ensure that you please it. I had promised myself when I was still an infant dyer that if I was going to take this somewhere, it would be about me and my need to feed repressed unruliness. At my age, life is a whole lot about accumulated responsibilities and operating at a constant level of dependability. I’m not different than most of you : the opportunity to shake off the bonds of middle age and reveal child-like freedom to do anything, in any way I see fit at the moment, is rare and precious. You have to recognize those moments and hold them safely in your soul.

If I can give any advice whatsoever is to stay “indie” at all cost. That’s probably food for a different blog entry, so I will leave that statement to stand on its own today. I seem to be going on quite a bit heavy this morning, so I will just leave you with a pretty picture of what a great big mess can truly become.

Not a veil, but Bambi is still my best way of showing off quickly just a little yardage.

Silk charmeuse, compression bound, injection dyed, washed out, tied, discharged and then overdyed. Always a surprise — sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always glorious and free.