More Babies!

Our family has had two new additions, little Clara Rosa born last October and now little Edward George born in April. They are both absolutely gorgeous and grandma has been busy sewing.

Baby Edward, known as Teddy, has a lot of clothing from his big brother, but with a new baby you want some new clothes as well. His mum wanted a wrap jackets and harem pants, so grandma dug into her baby fabric stash and made this outfit. It is a newborn size and won’t fit him for long, but at least he won’t get lost in it. The buttons could be a safety concern, except that in 50 years of sewing not one of my hand sewn buttons has ever come off, and I sewed these on extra carefully.

The top is the Newborn Kimono pattern from Purl Soho and the pants are the tiny harem pants from All Sewing Patterns. Both patterns are free.

Little Clara has recently started on solids, and her mum has requested some serious coverage bibs. I came across the idea of the bapron, or baby apron on Pinterest.

You can buy the pattern at Craftiness is not Optional, but I made mine from an online picture I found after a Google image search.

To get the pattern, I used the method described in my post How to Print a Pattern from a Sketch. As a size guide I used an RTW t-shirt I had on hand. I am sorry not to be able to show these off on my cute DGD, and will remedy this asap when I visit her in Shanghai next week.

This version is a sinfully expensive Marimekko fabric, but nothing is too good to be gunked on by a precious granddaughter! Fortunately there is enough left for a pretty Marimekko dress for her when she is a little older.

The other version is a jersey knit bought at Remant Warehouse, cheap but cute, and best of all with koalas to remind her of home.

I backed all the bibs using a pink towel found in great-grandma’s linen press after she passed away and we cleared out the house. Nice touch I think. Great-grandma would be pleased her towel has been put to such good use.

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African Zombie

I’m not sure if there is such a thing as an African zombie, I think zombies are native to the Caribbean, aren’t they? But what else can you call my latest block printing motif, when I only has one eye and hair standing up in all directions?

                                                
Last time I went to Rathdowne Remnants in Melbourne, I picked up a piece of brown linen from one of their remnant bins. It seemed a really good quality, but I could see why it was still for sale when there was not a lot of other linen left: the brown colour was especially unappealing. But I thought I could do something with it and so it came home with me. Then, when I came across some African graphics online I thought a couple of them would be the right look for my linen piece.

I have always liked the combination of black and brown, it is counter intuitive but somehow the black gives the accompanying brown a sort of coppery-gold appeal. And African looking graphics compliment those colours well.

But what to make out of the fabric? When I bought it, I had a sleeveless maxi dress in mind. Not a bad idea, except that I don’t wear dresses a lot. I feel too dressed up, if you pardon the pun. What does get worn, day after day after day, are tunics over pants. With my linen being a bit over 2m, I decided I had enough for a long sleeve tunic with a modest cowl.

For a pattern I used an Vogue 8542, now OOP. It is meant for knits and very oversized. I have made it up many times, always in a size 8, which goes to show how much ease there is. But this time I was using a woven, and therefore I went two sizes up to a 12. Possibly a little over the top, as the fit through the upper bodice is quite loose. I did want the dropped shoulders for comfort and to be able to wear a long sleeve tee underneath in colder weather, and the downside is the looser fit. If you want to read up on the details of the sewing process, please go to my entry on Pattern Review.

On to the printing details. Please skip these if block printing is not something you are interested in.

I always start my new printing session on paper, to make sure the block is carved properly and no extra bits show up. It also allows me to work out print placements and patterns. This time I was using two blocks, so this was particularly important. You want the finished piece to have a nice even distribution of motifs and a pleasing balance of fabric and ink.

I usually cut out my garment pieces and print them in the flat. I could print the whole fabric length, but that is a lot of extra work. I do join the shoulder seams on the front and back pieces, because the print placement around the face is important. I don’t overlock/serge the seams because it would add extra bulk that will show up when you place a print over it. With this project I also had a centre back seam, which I ironed flat with the seam allowances apart for the same reason. If you need to overlock it can be done later.

I did a grid of one motif first and then filled in the other one in between. When placing the motifs I use my hand or fingers as a guide (a whole hand’s width or so many fingers between motifs) and also the motifs themselves, i.e. how far to overlap the rows. I am reasonably good at this, but if you are starting out you may need more help with a ruler or a piece of thread placed across the fabric piece.

One bonus of using black paint was that I found colour penetration on the fabric to be especially good. Probably because I have been printing pastels for a while which are heavily mixed with super cover white, a paint that is quite thick. The black in comparison is much more runny. I also wet the foam roller first, squeezing out the excess, but the depth of the roller stays wet, stopping the paint from getting gluggy as it builds up in the foam over time. I use the foam roller to ink up my block, and the quality of paint it deposits is important.

I fix the ink in the hot dryer once it has air dried on a clothes rack. The inks I use are screen printing inks called Permaset, an Australian brand but I think they are available overseas as well. If you want a detailed explanation of the printing process in my posts Block Printing on Linen and Leaf Print Version 2.

Here are a few more pictures of the finished tunic.

  

Linked to blogger party RUMS

Live and Learn

There really is no substitute for experience. As I get more and more into fabric dyeing, printing and painting, I not only learn about what effects different techniques can achieve, but also what I will end up liking and using and what not. Sometimes the latter is quite counter intuitive. 

A case in point was when I branched out from painting silk to painting some of my existing boring white tops I wasn’t wearing. A couple of years ago I was mad keen on the new linen jerseys available, and I bought a few metres of white and made a couple of tunics. Problem was, that the white linen jersey was rather thin and quite sheer. You couldn’t really wear the sleeveless tunic I made without a tank top underneath, and what is the sense in that? If it is hot enough to wear sleeveless, would you really want a double layer?

The short sleeve version I also made with the white linen jersey made more sense worn with a tank underneath, but I found that I wasn’t wearing that either. I think the plain white just wasn’t exciting enough, once I got over the novelty value of the linen knit. So it hung in my wardrobe, unworn, but too good to get rid of because of the expensive fabric.

That was until I was all fired with zeal from my silk painting experiences and was looking the next project. So I took the short sleeve tunic, put it on a hanger, stuffed it with a large plastic sheet to stop the fabric surfaces from touching each other when wet with dye and had a go.

  
  
It didn’t work as well as I had hoped, and yet it was more of a success than I first thought.

   

From a technique point of view, the fabric dye didn’t spread nearly as well as it had with the silk. This is because the silk is much thinner and the dye runs and mixes like you wouldn’t believe. With the linen the dye stays put a lot more, which makes WHAT you actually paint on the fabric more important than it is with silk. With the silk, you just slap on the dye any which way, and apart from choosing and balancing the colours, what you actually paint on the fabric is not that important.

Fabrics thicker than silk such as a jersey knit are a different kettle of fish. I didn’t realise this when I painted the linen top, and once I had, it was of course too late. The deed was done.

I tried again with the sleeveless top, making it wetter before I started painting. Better I think, but still room for improvement.

  
Strangely, even though I felt a little disappointed with the painting job I did, I have worn the tops a lot. They have a relaxed hippy vibe I really enjoy on the weekends. Somehow the fact that they are not good enough to be suitable for work makes them favourites during my time off. Horses for courses, apparently, and that is a part of the learning process too.

But I think apart from painting the fabric very wet, the colour strength is important too, unless you want a particularly dark result. When I later painted some muslin bunny rugs (also called receiving blankets or nursery squares depending on which part of the world you live in), I not only painted them dripping wet, but also diluted the dyes heavily to get a more pastel look. I like the results a lot.

   

   

Encouraged I painted some tshirts for DGS where the colours have blended almost as much as with silk. I hung up the tees sopping wet with fixative and slopped on a lot of heavily diluted dye. Sort of like tie dying without the ties.  I used old pantyhose to hang them on my clothes horse and stuffed them with plastic bags to prevent dye soaking through from front to back. The latter may be unnecessary as I realised later.

 

Once they had been washed and dried I block printed the white dinosaur shapes. I made the stamps with foam stick on shapes I had bought at Eckersley, our local art materials chain. I stuck two shapes on top of each other to a piece of perspex. I think three shapes would have been better  as I kept getting ink on the backing when inking up with the roller and had to wipe it off.

  
DGS is crazy about dinosaurs and knows all the exotic ones. Unfortunately grandma only had some common garden variety dinosaur shapes for printing, but the shirts went down well anyway. 

    

…and the back where you can see the colours a bit better…
  
Pity I didn’t photograph the tees when they were nicely ironed after I fixed the prints. Catching up on that later when they had already been worn and washed was not the same, a long way from the glossy marketing photos on the online RTW sites.

To talk technique for those interested, the dye needs to be mixed with a ‘fixative’ to take properly, which is a soda ash solution and a bit of salt. You can mix this in with the dye and paint it all on together, but the mixture will only be active for an hour before it becomes exhausted and doesn’t dye properly anymore. For longer painting sessions, you would have to mix up your dyes every hour, which is not really economical, because you would inevitable mix up a bit more than you actually need to make sure you don’t run out before you finish a garment. The leftovers would end up wasted. But the Drimarene K alone dissolved in water will last for a long time if not mixed with the soda ash. So instead of wetting the garments/fabric length in plain water, I soak them in the soda ash solution before painting, and give myself more time to use up the dyes. You still get some of the soda ash into the dye as you move the brush from dye to fabric and back again, but not a lot. To eliminate this altogether, you could try squirting the dye on with a squirt bottle. I think this would work particularly well with thick fabrics and t-shirts. You could lay the latter flat and soak the front and back with dye at the same time. Like I said earlier, like tie dyeing without the ties.

For detailed instruction on the dye painting process and dye recipes, please refer to my previous post ‘Silk and Paint! Yay!’