I wanted to thank you all for the warm welcome. I am overwhelmed. Thank you.
Something New
Yesterday evening, I felt the urge to begin something new, some woven boro style thing. I am intrigued by the possibilities of fabric weaving. I like the look very much and how it handles. Most of the fabrics I have are vintage linens and cottons. Bedsheeds (definitely not usable for woven boro), cotton pillow cases and duvet covers, linen dishcloths and towels. Most are not exactly the lightweight stuff Jude recommends but some are still manageable.Especially the old and used dishcloths are so worn out that some of them barely stay together. They make nice weaving material.
The background is an old dishcloth, crush dyed in indigo and I wanted to keep the undyed parts intact.
Another detail I wanted to preserve, the monogram dyed really nice, darker than the rest.
I basted the piece last evening. My stitch is not exactly invisible but I used a dark blue and a white sewing thread. Somehow sewing threads accumulated over the years, so they usually are my default threads.
And this morning, while looking at the first piece, I began with another one.
Plain weave, the background fabric is some vintage damast cotton, indigo dyed and then overdyed in oak bark, which gives it a slightly greyish green hue. The other fabrics are dishcloths and some other vintage damast dyed in indigo, the red is cochenille and the darkish purple is logwood.I love the fraying. Linen threads are really dense and they usually don't dye through. At least not when you're dipping only two or three times to keep it light blue. When you tear them, the fraying sometimes is still lighter or even white. And I think that looks fabulous. Very organic.
The reason all those colours work well together is that they are all natural colours. Somehow you can't go wrong when you combine the most unlikely colours as long as they are all natural dyed.
Producers of synthetic dyes know that, which is why you have colourways (Ashford acid dyes for example come in winter and summer hues - this way the colours of one colourway will always match) and you shouldn't combine different synthetic dyes by different producers. Everyone of them works in a special colourway and combining colourways from different producers can look quite garish.
Something Old
This is the thing I originally wanted to work on when I began something new last evening.
It is the front of a bag I began many moons ago. When I was still working with synthetic dyes ;o)
The blue part is from an old silk shirt and the white part is some vintage cotton pillow case. The colour parts are reverse appliqued and are vintage cotton dyed with synthetic dyes.
This is the back. Still the same old silk with some stitching. I love spirals.
The inside of the bag is made from an old flanell shirt and its two breast pockets. One can never have too many pockets in a bag ;o)
And here is a detail from the front. Here the thread is some indigo dyed linen thread.
Still wandering
Ulrike