Last year I had this brilliant brainwave of stencilling Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ on a dress for Christmas. As it turned out I didn’t like it at all when it was done. Needless to say, the dress got shelved in favour of another outfit.
But I had only stencilled the front and I still had quite a bit of the navy viscose/cotton left, so this year I decided to rescue the dress by cutting a new front. This looks much better, the fabric has a nice subtle lustre and I am too traumatised by the previous stencilling failure to attempt any more interference with the elegant simplicity of the plain navy. I’m wearing it here with silver beads, but I think a long pearl necklace would also look good. I have a nice baroque one, pity I didn’t think of that when I took the photos.
But keeping my fingers away from the paint pots wasn’t easy, so to distract me I decided to make a second dress from the same pattern where I could give free rein to my artistic impulses and throw paint at it to my hearts content.
You can see the pattern of the dress a bit better here, the ‘points’ are tucked in to give the skirt its shape.
The pattern used is the StyleArc Toni, heavily modified to eliminate the front seam and the collar, with a cap sleeve added. The fabric for the navy dress is viscose/cotton and for the tan cotton sateen, both repurposed from sheets bought on special.
Now the only problem is, which one to wear for Christmas? I am leaning towards the tan and black for Christmas Day. Mr Rivergum says the painting reminds him of reindeer antlers.
That leaves the navy dress for New Year’s Eve. But it’s anyone’s guess whether I will be able to resist making paint-based improvements if I have that much time on my hands. A bit of silver would look awfully good with the navy…
It is getting hot now, being an El Niño year, so I thought long, loose linen dresses would be just the thing to keep me cool this summer.
For my first one I chose a pinkish-grey-mauve linen, which looks lovely, sophisticated and cool. But unfortunately it soon became clear that teamed with black this colour instantly turns to anaemic and washed out. Too late, once the black ink is on the fabric there is no way back.
So I finished the dress and took photos, which sometimes makes me change my mind. But this time it only confirmed what I had feared, the two colours did absolutely nothing for each other.
There is no way to change the black ink to something lighter, but thankfully the base colour is easy to overdye and I have a whole arsenal of dyes with which to attack this problem. Not that I would want to use them all at once. 🙂
The idea was to deepen the colour, to make it hold its own against the black. Dyeing can be a gamble, but I keep notes on previous dye projects which help a lot, and also have a fair bit of experience now. I am really happy with the result. The main thing to remember with linen is that you need only a fraction of the amount of dye that cotton takes for the same colour depth. I used as much soda ash as I would with cotton and there was very little dye left unfixed. This is great because that way it is much quicker to wash the garment out after dyeing than if there is lots of dye left in the water, and it’s much less wasteful too. And in case you are wondering, the printing ink is not affected by the dye.
So here is the dyed version (enthusiastically photo bombed by Amadeus, the Siamese kitten).
The pattern used is the Tessuti Lily linen dress, with the elbow length sleeves modified to cap sleeves.
Has anyone else noticed how erratic the weather has been lately? The temperature changes are phenomenal. We have had 35C one day and 17C on another, all within the same week. Ok, it’s spring, so some variation is expected, but really?
So here is a dress for the freezing cold. The fabric is ponte (Romanit) and the double layer cowl keeps me nice and toasty. The light colour isn’t particularly low maintenance, but it’s a comfy outfit for a more dressy lunch. Not that I go to many these days, sigh.
This is the shape of the skirt part. The pointed bits are tucked into themselves to produce the tiered shape. You could leave them out to dangle, but I prefer them tucked in.
And here is the close up of the cowl. The fabric is double to give it more body so it will collapse into itself in a pleasing manner instead of hanging off my neck like a wet pancake. At least that’s the plan.
The top of the dress is a plain round neck and fitted shoulders, taken from a classic long sleeve tee pattern. The lower half is the StyleArc Toni Designer Dress pattern, heavily modified. Essentially I eliminated the CF and CB seam and merged it with the t-shirt pattern.
And for the super hot days of this crazy spring, here is a short sleeve linen number.
I have gone back to a more classic A-line silhouette for this summer. Much as I love the cocoon look, it doesn’t suit me, and slow learner that I am, I have a lot of dresses to prove it.
The fabric is a repurposed Ikea curtain, 100% linen and specialled off at a ridiculously cheap price. I bought a lot of these curtains and have found that they wear really well. Which is a good thing as I have made quite a lot of garments using it. The pattern is the Tessuti Lily linen dress, lengthened by about 12 cm, and modified to have short sleeves. I skipped the patch pockets in favour of inseam ones.
P.S. I forgot to mention that the black motifs are done with American type freezer paper stencils and black screen printing ink. The freezer paper has a shiny side that sticks when ironed onto the fabric and can be peeled off again, after you apply the ink, without leaving a residue.
Just a few lines from my hotel room in Porto to sing the praises of hemp fabric. I have travel-tested it for the last two weeks, either in my suitcase or wearing it, and it is fantastic.
No, you won’t get high when wearing hemp and its association with cannabis has been a misfortune for this fabulous fibre. Australia banned cannabis in the 1922 and other nations did the same in the early and later 20th century. Hemp fibre had been very popular for centuries for all sorts of applications, until nylon hit the market around 1940, ushering in a whole new era of synthetics. Between the new competition and the war on drugs, hemp production was pretty much finished.
But recently hemp has been making a comeback, mostly due to its eco friendly properties. Hemp crops need only a fraction of the water of cotton, don’t need weed killing chemicals and have a short growth cycle from seeding to harvest. A dream crop, one would think.
Nevertheless, hemp fabric is still rare because of the unfortunate link to cannabis, and it is therefore very expensive. There is a cult following prepared to pay the high prices and I know of one shop in my area that sells exclusively hemp textiles. If you are thinking rough fibre ropes or sacks, that is not what devotees are prepared to shell out $$$ for. Hemp fabric is hard to tell apart from linen, except it doesn’t wrinkle nearly as much and becomes soft with wear very quickly, making it beautifully drapey despite its relative thickness, reminiscent of bottom weight tencel.
I was lucky enough to buy some hemp sheets at Aldi, on sale at a good price, with the intentions of using the fabric for garments. This outfit is the StyleArc Bob pants and my TNT (Tried and True) pattern for a summer top, the Tessuti Mandy with cuffs instead of sleeves.
Hemp sews up easily and takes my dye nicely for painting. It is a good alternative to linen, and also very strong and durable, so basic items like white pants will probably be part of my wardrobe for a long time. Anything more trendy like the top has naturally a shorter lifespan, but I can imagine cutting off the sleeves and turning it into a couple of tea towels when the style is no longer current.
This outfit has been in a suitcase for two weeks and then been worn for a couple of days on my trip in Portugal and still looks pretty good.
I have some notes on what not to do when making white pants which are on PatternReview.
And below is a quick video. I am moving my legs a bit to show the drapiness of the hemp fabric. Hope this gives you an idea and doesn’t just look very silly. 🙂
For this top I used the Georgia top pattern by Elizabeth Suzann Studio. The fabric is linen and the flowers were stencilled with thickened dye for the blue and screenprinting ink for the grey. As a general rule, I use dye only when I must for the vibrant colour and the soft hand of the fabric, because it is a pain to work with. When I can get away with it I prefer the ink.
I used an Ikea curtain for these culottes, a heavier weight cotton with a nice herringbone weave. It was a creamy white originally, now dyed blue. The pattern is a variation of Vogue 8712 and the details are on PetternReview. The top is an older one, hand painted with dye.
Very happy with this grey linen top, love the geckos. Although I am always careful when using animal motifs, trying not to make them too cutesy, I don’t want to look as if I am working in a childrens ward at a hospital. (No offence intended to nurses, we are all very grateful for what they do.) BTW, this is straight off the clothes line, no ironing!
For the next couple of projects I am using a set of linen sheets, bought at a steep discount which worked out at $8/m. Great price and allows for a relaxed approach with my experiments. I do like the colour, a sort of muted pinky greyish mauve, but king size sheets yield a lot of garments and I can’t see myself with a whole wardrobe of this colour. It is also not that easy to combine with another colour either, grey is all that comes to mind, both for outfits and for painting. I tried to think outside the square with using pink, but wasn’t impressed with the result.
Not that great. I am really fussy, if I don’t love it I won’t wear it. I then tried to save this by dyeing the background purple, but let’s say that it was only a very modest improvement. The photo is actually kinder than the reality.
The purple turned out far darker than intended, and again, this is likely to languish at the back of my wardrobe. While it doesn’t look too bad, what do you combine this with? Pink pants? Purple pants? I tried black and didn’t like it much. I think I will continue to experiment with this top, removing the dye with a discharge agent. There is nothing to lose at this point and I might as well get some experience with discharging.
But I did learn something valuable from this disappointment: it seems that this linen, and possibly linen in general, takes the dye much more intensively than cotton. I have not done much immersion dyeing with linen, usually I paint on thickened dye with a brush. But with this immersion dyeing I used 3 teaspoons of dye powder, a third less than recommended in the recipe I have been using for cotton, and it turned out way darker than anticipated.
So I dialled the dye back a lot with my next project and that was sooo much better.
This time I used a plastic baby spoon to measure my dye (repurposing what’s left from when the grandchildren were little rather than throwing more plastic into landfill). The baby spoon is much smaller than a teaspoon and I used only 1 spoonful. That small quantity over-dyed the original colour really quite spectacularly. Dye is transparent, so when you dye you expect the original colour to show through and influence the result. This is why you can’t dye a darker colour lighter. But the fuchsia is really quite clear and untainted from the rather murky original.
I am too traumatised for now to try purple again, but I have already tried light blue and that was successful too, a nice mid blue denim colour.
Good to know as I work my way through many metres of this linen, although for a change I left the original colour intact with my next project.
But surprise, I used a new pattern! Doesn’t happen very often, but the Assembly Line, a Swedish independent pattern maker had a sale and i bought their cuff top. Normally they are too expensive for me and i would have just altered one of my patterns to reproduce the style, but their discount tempted me and I thought that I really need a new style for my tops. The Athina is great as a canvas for painting but we all need a change now and then.
There will be more of these tops and I might even make a skirt to go with this one, the top seems to be asking for it. Maybe a box pleat number? Or an A-line? This is what the pattern maker suggests, looks like a quarter circle with a gathered waist.
The sewing details for the Cuff Top are on PatternReview .
Rust might not be everyone’s favourite colour, but I’m sure I will be making lots of lovely rust-coloured garments this summer. All Ikea’s fault, because they specialled off their rust coloured linen curtains for a ridiculous price. Was there a palace revolt of bean counters against the designers or was it just some sort of embarrassing mistake? Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help but go berserk and buy several packets. Each pair of curtains is 5m of linen, which makes …. uhm … let’s not do the maths, too embarrassing! Suffice it to say that I love the colour (which is just as well), and the price of around $8/m allows me so much more freedom to experiment than if I had to shell out the usual $25-40 in the fabric shops. So it’s a win-win, Ikea gets to get rid of stock they clearly don’t want and I get to get rid off my fear of ruining expensive fabric when trying out new ideas.
I started making inroads into my stash of many meters of red-brown linen with a tunic painted with a super simple abstract in black. I really like the colour combo even if it is not particularly spring-like. But with the long sleeves it will be just the right weight for the change of season and in any case, autumn is sure to come again. 🙂
The pattern is the Tessuti Athina, what else, this time in the longer length, meant to be worn over loose pants. The motif was painted on with a brush with screen printing ink and the signature had to be stencilled as such fine lines are hard with a brush on the rough texture of linen. Too easy to spoil the whole thing at the last moment with some gluggy blobs. I used screen printing ink because I was too impatient to wait the 8 hours or overnight you need with dye before being able to sew this up. In all my impatient enthusiasm I forgot to peel away the newspaper under the fabric while the ink was still wet, so now I have bits of newspaper permanently stuck on the inside. Serves me right, but I could always claim that it adds to that ‘artisan look’. 🙂
I modified the Athina slightly by installing slits at sides, to about high hip level. Makes more sense with something this long and allows easy access to my pant pockets.
Next in my line up of rust coloured linen garments is a calf-length tunic with short sleeves, again split at the sides to the waist.
This could be worn over pants or possibly even a skirt. I have tried this look before with a knit and long sleeves in winter, but when you need a jacket over the top to keep warm the super long tunic can look awkward. So short sleeved for summer, when jackets are not necessary, is probably a better idea.
The pattern here, surprise surprise, is not the Athina but the Georgia dress by Elizabeth Suzann Studio. More about the sewing details and modifications are on PatternReview.
The stencilled motif is an old favourite, one of the Matisse cut-outs, stencilled with freezer paper and this time I took my time with thickened dye, to preserve the soft hand of the fabric.
I had a brief flirtation with using these giraffes, but I am a bit wary of animals on my clothes.
Too cutesy? Maybe not if it is sufficiently stylised and the safari theme suits the colour. I might still try it if I find I like wearing this new silhouette of a long tunic with split sides over pants. Apparently we are in for another cool summer on the Australian east coast, so I won’t be wearing sleeveless dresses all that much.
Looking back on my recent makes i think that I like my dye painted tops best, like this one.
So why not keep going into this direction and make some more? I saw this painting by Samiro Yunoki and thought it could be adapted.
I drew something similar, turned 90 degrees and multiples of it, on my fabric with pencil.
Then I filled it in with thickened dye, front, back and sleeve pieces.
I used heavily thickened black dye which made nice sharp outlines, then filled in between. It probably took about 2 hours. Of course, if I had screen printed this it would have taken mere minutes, but I like the hand painting. Plus I only need one garment for me to wear, not lots to sell.
The fabric is cotton and meant to be a ‘muslin’, not one to try out a pattern but to try out a painting idea. I have a piece of linen in the same light grey colour which will be my ‘real’ project. I like the painting as shown above, with just the black, and think this is what I will do with the linen. Maybe only make the black design a little larger.
But for the trial piece I have added a colour wash to see what this will look like. This was in the interest of gaining more experience, as colour washes are a bit unpredictable, but of course I also don’t need two tops the same. Then there is the issue of cotton versus linen. With the simple black design there is a real difference in the final look of the garment between an upmarket fabric versus something more humble. The cotton wouldn’t look nearly as good ‘naked’ as the linen, so I thought maybe more colour would help.
It does, but as a certifiable fibre snob I still think the cotton looks a bit cheap. Fair enough when I am using a recycled doona cover. Maybe a heavier cotton would give a more upmarket looking result.
The colour wash turned out quite well, except for the spotty look that I suspect is due to water drops.
Never mind, let not perfection be the enemy of good. 😉
Can’t help myself! I had to fiddle with this dress which was not bad, but not really good either.
So I overpainted it in blue. I did this double layered, meaning that I was too lazy to open up the side seams and lay it flat. Note to self: single layered will give a better result! The blue is possibly a little more mottled than I wanted, although not too bad.
I could of course have immersion dyed it, but I wanted some colour variations. Subtle ones, so I could print over the top. This was the motif I wanted to use.
What I didn’t count on was that the criss-cross brush strokes would still be very visible.
I don’t think overprinting would work with this background, too busy, even with low contrast prints like in black.
Do I like the blue better than the green? I do, although that is a purely personal preference. Arguably the blue brush strokes had more impact on the green.
But I didn’t really like that particular shade of green and blue is my favourite colour, so there!
I might mock up black prints in Photoshop and see if it would look good against my expectations. But this is probably the end of the road for this dress. I quite like it, but let’s see if it will get worn or not!
Experimentation is essential if you want to go on learning, and not every experiment is a resounding success. I have been wanting to try brushing freehand lines with dye onto fabric, something like these paintings:
Black on white looks good, or black on khaki or beige, but the fabric I happened to have available was more of the light green I used for the turkey top. Light green is not an easy colour for this kind of thing and I did not want to pair it with black again. So instead of maximum contrast I tried for low contrast, which meant a mid blue with the green.
The result is sort of ok, but with hindsight I should probably have used a darker blue. Not that there is any guarantee that I would have been happier with the outcome.
A project being ‘ok’ is not really what I am after. I had the dress hanging on the outside of my wardrobe for a week or so, trying to make up my mind what to do with it. When I was thinking about it, I was certain that I wanted to overpaint and turn it into something different. But every time I actually looked at it I thought that it was ‘quite nice’.
You can see from the back view why I thought a darker blue would have been better. I could still add more lines with an indigo blue. But don’t be surprised if this dress is completely mid blue next time you see it, with or without block prints, or whatever.
But there is no rush, I can overpaint any time, so I thought I would let life decide. If it turns out that I am keen to take the dress out of my wardrobe and wear it, all and good. If it languishes unworn, I will have another go at it.
Whether it will be an improvement is anyone’s guess. 🙂
The pattern used is the Tessuti Lily Linen Dress and the fabric is another Ikea Nattjasmin sheet, which is a mix of cotton and viscose.
Dye Painting Notes
Drimarene K fibre reactive dye powder Blue RL, mixed with sodium alginate thickener
1 teaspoon sodium alginate powder mixed with 250ml of water in blender — not really thick enough, should be 2-3 teaspoons.
Left to cure for several days, very little dye coming out in the wash
Now that I have recovered somewhat from end of year exhaustion, I’m on a roll with my blogging. I even summoned the energy to do a video showing the dye painting process, because lots of people seem to like the results but are afraid of the process.
It really isn’t rocket science. It can be messy, which will be off-putting for some, but that can be controlled. The nice thing about dye painting is that the hand of the fabric stays soft, not plasticky like with screen printing inks. The garments also don’t run in the wash, and the colours don’t fade. With linen especially the dyes and supporting chemicals work wonders in preventing wrinkles. What’s not to like?
The best way to get started with dye painting is to do the sort of abstract watercolour I am showing here, where you just slap on the paint any which way and let the colours run and mingle. It’s super easy, but be warned that it is rabbit hole that will lead to a whole new world of creativity once you jump into it.
Here are all the details:
Fabric choice: only natural fibres will work with fibre-reactive dyes. Start with viscose or cotton, or linen if you are brave.
Dyes: fibre reactive dyes are sooo much better than the stuff in the supermarket. They are more expensive, but 50g will do many garments. The dyes don’t run or fade, as already mentioned. Two brands I know are Procion MX (sold by Dharma Trading in the US), or the Drimarene K available to me here in Australia ( sold by Batik Oetoro). You will get instructions of how to mix up your dyes and what other chemicals you need where you buy the dyes.
Paula Burch has a fabulous website that tells you everything you would ever want to know about dyeing.
How I did this project:
I used linen. Fabric must be painted single layer. I sewed up the shoulder seams before painting.
I mixed up about 1/3 to 1/2 a teaspoon of dye powder in half a plastic cup of plain water for all colours but black
For the black accents, I used sodium alginate gel (2 teaspoons of sodium alginate powder in 250ml of water, blended in blender) instead of water with the dye powder. Sodium alginate is a safe food additive, so you can use your blender without fear of poisoning yourself and your family. I poured the gel into a container, added the dye powder and mixed.
Dye thickened with sodium alginate does run and bleed, but not as much as dye dissolved in plain water. (If you ever want to paint with dye that doesn’t bleed, you need to paint with well thickened dye on dry fabric. In order to fix the dye, this fabric must have been pre-treated with soda ash, then dried.)
The soda ash solution is around half a cup of soda ash ( or three times as much washing soda) in 4L of water. Spray on after painting. The wetter the fabric becomes, the more the dye colours will mingle.
Leave the fabric for 8 hours or overnight to cure. It needs to stay damp. The longer you leave the fabric to cure, the more intense the colours.
When washing out the dye, you can use Synthrapol or other low pH detergent, but with this type of painting it is not really necessary. Synthrapol prevents the dye that is being washed out from over-dyeing undyed areas or muddying the colours. With a painterly watercolour project it is unlikely this will be a problem.
Dry the fabric and sew up. Colours will be paler once the fabric has dried, but it will not get paler from washing after this.
I have noticed that if you hang up your painted linen garment dripping wet after washing and pull out any wrinkles, it will dry beautifully smooth, with only a little texture. You won’t need to iron it unless you want to. I usually iron a new garment as part of the finishing process, after that it could be left to fend for itself.
Materials List:
Fabric to use is cotton, viscose or linen. Must be natural fibres, but NOT wool. For a practice run you could use an old cotton sheet, but it needs to be a light colour as dyes cannot make a dark colour lighter.
Some sort of plastic as a base. I use a sheet of corflute from a hardware store.
Fibre- reactive dye powder dissolved in water
Soda ash (swimming pool supply shops) dissolved in water
Sodium alginate gel if using, can be bought online as a powder to be blended with water in a blender