dyeing paper

Hey there campers; it's been awhile!

I thought I'd test the waters with a brief post about dyeing paper for special projects like wedding invitations, book binding or Christmas cards.

I dyed this fuchsia paper for wedding invitation inserts this summer.

You can dye any paper; it's made of plant fiber most of the time, like cotton clothing. High cotton-content paper and paper with linen fiber get the best color, but even regular newsprint or drawing paper can be dyed using Rit Dye or Dylon. (Dylon is my preference.) This color is called Flamingo Pink.

I used a 110 lb arches cold press watercolor paper trimmed to A4 size, then pre-soaked it in a bath of hot water with just a dash of dish soap. I use the dish soap as a nod to my method of dyeing clothes; I always pre-soak and wash to achieve even dyeing by saturating the fabric and removing any waxes, oils, or fixatives. With paper, the saturation is key and the soap, while probably not completely necessary, is just a little bonus to help assure that the saturation is allowed to happen.

I dye paper in my stainless steel kitchen sink. It's easy, large, readily available and unlikely to stain. I boil water and pour it into the plugged sink; just until I have 2 or 3 inches of water in the sink. I add 3 or 4 times the recommended amount of salt and stir until dissolved.

I add the dye before I add the paper, and stir till dissolved. A quarter of a package is a good place to start, since I dye paper in batches. Paper into dye, saturating one side and then the other, eight or ten sheets in the bath at a time. Keep track of how many, as you'll be turning and repositioning the sheets in the bath every ten minutes or so for relatively even dyeing. And repeat until the dye cools or you get a color a couple of shades deeper than your desired result (dyed paper and fabric tend to lighten as the dry).

Of course, the idiosyncrasies of hand-dyeing are often desirable. I like to sprinkle a little dye powder in the bath to add speckles sometimes.

Rinse in cool water, then press gently in a towel,  hang with pipe cleaners ("chenille stems") and clips, and let air dry.

Paper will warp a little as it dries, so ironing will be necessary to run dyed paper through a printer or a printing press. Use a press cloth and turn your iron on the cotton setting, no steam.

Thanks for dropping in as I attempt to get my sea legs back! I hope you'll stop by again soon. I aim to.

fairy flower surprise gift (giant tissue paper flower)

These make a nifty way to present a tiny gift to someone special, whatever the occasion.  Extra large fairy flowers are an especially nice way to package costume jewelry for kids' birthdays; this one, for example, concealed a comically large metallic ring with a huge purple plastic gemstone for a girl who loves fairies.

I think these flowers make a nice gift in themselves, as well, or pretty awesome party favors. They're also versatile, easy to make, and use materials that are reasonably easy to find.

Start with six squares of tissue paper. To make the largest flower possible, use full-sized sheets of tissue with an end cut off to make a square. For smaller flowers, use smaller squares of paper. I used two sheets each of green, pink, and yellow, but you can alter the colors to match your theme.

Stack them up, and make one-inch wide accordion folds from one end of the stack to the other.

Use scissors to round the ends of the folded stack, then use a green pipe cleaner (aka chenille stem) to cinch the stack at the middle.

Carefully separate the layers of paper, gently pulling and shaping them up and towards the center to look like petals and leaves.

Use a length of 20 gauge steel wire to make a long stem, and use it to follow the green pipe cleaner around the center of the flower.

At the flower's base, twist the pipe cleaner and stem wire together, then wrap the entire stem with patterned washi tape or masking tape. The stem should be sturdy enough to hold the flower upright.

The center will be where you place the bundled present! Wrap your gift in layers of tissue paper and twist the top. Use two short lengths of pink chenille stems to twist around the top of the bundle, curling the ends.

Apply a rolled piece of the patterned masking tape or a piece of double-sided tape to the bottom of the bundle. (Hint: If you're planning on traveling very far or the jewelry is very expensive, I'd attach the bundle with hot glue instead of tape.)
 

Insert the bundle into the flower's center and press hard to secure it in place. Make sure to include a line in an attached card to let the recipient of the gift know to check the center of the flower for a hidden surprise!

If you plan to make a bunch of these as party favors, you can cut up to a dozen sheets of paper into squares at once to save time, and then build the flowers assembly-line style.

Thanks for reading!

chevron wedding quilt (part three)

**Alert! This is going to be a bit of a long post because I'll be writing today about the quilting and binding steps, as well as showing photos of the finished project. After spending so many hours on this quilt, I'm really eager to just have it out in the world. Enjoy!**

When I left you off on the progress on my sister's wedding quilt (previously written about here and here), I had so far:
• taken wedding reception fabric + coordinating fabrics and cut them into triangles
• paired the triangles together to make squares
• counted the squares and designed a chevron-pattern layout in Illustrator
• sewed the squares into rows
• sewed the rows into a quilt top
• laid out the backing, batting, and quilt top and pinned them together.

On a small scale, like a doll quilt or a baby quilt (both of which I've made several of before), this doesn't take much forethought or effort, but this was my first queen-sized quilt and the logistics were way beyond me.

When it came time to sew the layers together, I had free-motion quilting in mind. In the end, I decided to go a different way because: a) I don't own a long arm quilting machine; b) hiring someone else to do it is way too rich for my blood; and c) it would have taken three weeks before it was returned to me. So I scrapped my plan and my "out-of-my-league" ambitions, and went with something a little simpler.

I started out by "stitching in the ditch". That is, with every row and column, I stitched along the seam, hidden in the crease. Then, along each diagonal, I borrowed a method from Rachel Denbow over at Smile and Wave and stitched along either side of the seam to emphasize the chevron pattern on the back.

With a large quilt and a regular-size sewing machine, what made this possible was using thin quilt batting and keeping the quilt rolled as I worked on a section at a time. If I hadn't taken the time to keep the quilt rolled, I would have ended up with a bunchy mess or possibly with weird corners of the quilt sewed together.

I used scraps to make the binding using this method, again using a tutorial from Smile and Wave. Basically, I cut all my leftover squares into three-inch wide strips and stitched them together.

After ironing, I attached the binding by following the tutorial seen here. It looked really, really nice. By far the nicest quilt binding I've ever made. Also the most labor-intensive, so there's definitely a connection between effort and results on projects like this.

To finish things off, I embroidered a mason jar with their initials onto the back of the quilt.

When all of the machine sewing, hand sewing, and embroidery were finished, I tossed the quilt into the dryer with a couple of dryer sheets and two damp hand towels to give it a finished look, a fresh smell, and to help remove some of the cat hair my house tends to add to projects. Nothing's worse than a labor of love covered in pet hair. (exaggeration)

Phew! So the next step was to wrap it off and send it. I'm sure those of you who've attempted a project like this can empathize with that stress. I wrapped it in parchment paper, put it in a cardboard box, and absolutely covered the box in packing tape. And then I paid for an extra $250 worth of insurance, because dammit, if anything happened to it in transit, I knew I didn't have the moxie to start a new one right away and I'd just have to buy her a quilt. I had my eye on this one.

Luckily it arrived in stellar condition, and my sister loves it to bits. I hope it lasts a long time in her happy home, and survives to be the heirloom I mean it to be. 

Thanks for reading along as I tackled this! Top tip for anyone who might be thinking about starting their first large quilt: take time for all those time-consuming preparatory steps. I'm an anxious crafter and I tend to prefer immediate results, but I'm always happier with the final product (always) when I take time for things like measuring and ironing and trimming. Word to the wise.

p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them, but I'm sure you already knew that, clever you!

chevron wedding quilt (part two)

Pinning the quilt (started this summer, last mentioned here in November, finished very recently), took a little more than four hours and seven hundred pins, which wasn't much considering I worried about how to do it for a month.

I was lucky enough to have a more quilt-experienced friend to advise me to move my furniture and tape the backing to the floor super-taut. I used high-tack blue masking tape to stretch it a bit at a time, then layered and smoothed the batting and the top into place.

I pinned starting near the center, then towards the margins in quadrants, a pin in each seam and corner, and more along the edge.

Anyway, that's it for now. Anyone struggling with how, exactly, a gigantic, room-sized quilt gets pinned together in the middle of the night before a preschooler can ix-nay the ork-way, now has a bit of a heads-up, complete with nighttime photos.

More soon! Thanks for reading.

chevron wedding quilt (part one)

I'm a bit in over my depth here, having never completed a queen-sized quilt. But I'm making progress.

Here are the square patches, each stitched from two triangles of grey/yellow/black/white fabric.

Most of the fabric was used on the tables at my sister's wedding reception, with some filler from the fabric store in the same color range.

After I'd used up all of my fabric making blocks, I made a chart in Illustrator to work out the pattern. I counted my patches and made a simple replica of each one, grouping, copying, and pasting the right number of copies before arranging them in a simple chevron pattern.

Much easier than trying to find a wide, clean, preschooler-free space to lay everything out, believe it or not. I'm using shaded overlays to keep track of which areas I've already completed: the white shaded areas on the left are completed; the grey shaded area is stitched into short rows, waiting to be assembled to finish that section.

The blocks are coming together. Instead of long strips, I sewed the first 2/3 of the top in nine- or twelve-block sections and then sewed the sections together. The hope was that I'd keep the corners well-aligned this way, but you can tell from the photos that despite my careful ironing, trimming and sewing, there are still some "off" corners. I'm trying not to obsess over it, with limited success.

The good news is that with the prep work done, the the sewing is going quickly. The bad news is that I have no idea at all how to stitch all the layers together on something so large, and still keep the wrinkles at bay. We'll have to wait and see how that goes.

This careful measuring, ironing, trimming, etc. is very different from the way I usually work with my hands. This is more like graphic design, where I treasure rulers and rules. So it's a switch, but I'm enjoying it, I think.

Wish me luck with the finishing stages!

thrift store finds: vintage scales

 

The white "Family Scale" came from an estate sale and the brown postal scale came from a thrift store, both within the past few months. Both are in good working condition and measure accurately.

I think they'll make charming display pieces at weddings on the candy or favor tables.

I can also picture the scales being used as uniquely awesome cake stands (with the cardboard cake board attached to the scale's top with some adhesive tabs).

And I think the family scale would look extra cute on a baby shower table!

I always think it's curious how I find things in batches, like theses scales, or my hoosier boxes (of which I now have three), or pianos (I only have one, but I saw several at thrift stores in the months before and after purchasing mine. It must have been piano season).

Have you noticed that, too?

Thanks for reading!

Linking up to:
The Cottage Market 
Helene's Legacy

heirloom clothespin dolls & a love story

My paternal grandparents were married in the midwest in the early 1940s, as young college graduates. Grandma's dress was  long and made of ivory silk, and her smile glows and her eyes shine from happiness in the photos I've seen of that day. I think most days with my Grandpa, they probably shone just the same.

She was on the shorter side of our family tree, and birdlike in so many ways (I remember her laugh like birdsong, her light hands and their feathery movements). She was small enough that the seamstress overestimated the length of her gown, and several inches had to be trimmed from the hem. Several inches that she, a saver like me (only with more attic space), stashed away through fifty-six years of life after their wedding day, and which Grandpa, unawares, stashed away for an additional fourteen long years after her death.

And so the trimmings of Grandma's silk wedding gown lay undiscovered until, cleaning out some hidey space after Grandpa followed her into the unknown, my dad and his siblings found them again. The pieces must have been labeled, or they might not have recognized what they were. Or possibly Grandma stored the pieces with her dress, and my dad and aunts and uncles knew them on sight. Somehow it came from my dad to me, to split in some way between my sisters and I.

They came as two oddly shaped pieces, maybe five inches at the widest point and tapering, at the ends, to nothing. I imagine the nervous hands of the person making the alterations, wanting to get it just right in one try. This was someone's wedding dress, after all. No room for error.

Though long, the odd shape of the two pieces made it hard to decide how to use them. I sat on the project for another year, cut a piece to try to make a silk flower, and abandoned the project as too ugly to live.

Thrown off by my craft fail, I stashed the silk away for another six months before inspiration struck in the form of clothespin dolls.

Grandma was crafty like me, too. Really, a number of us (aunts, sisters, cousins) share the affliction. For Grandma, it was mostly knit and crochet. An afghan for each grandchild was our birthright, and I remember very clearly a baby blue sweater she once made for me when I was a kindergartner. It was knit in a checkerboard weave pattern. I loved it. I have exactly one photograph of it. This one. (We were camping with some cousins, one of whom is, in this photo, regretting her offer to share her chair with her stocky five-year-old cousin with the bloody knee.)

I have more photos of my Grandma and Grandpa than I have of this sweater, but not many. After marrying, my grandparents moved to Southern California where my Grandpa made a name for himself as an aerospace electrical engineer. Grandma raised five kids and managed a house using her degree in home economics, and she did a good job on every one. One of them (my dad) married and moved north to pursue a career as a a civil engineer. After that,  they saw him (and later, us) only once a year or so. I don't have as many photos or memories of them as my SoCal cousins do, and I didn't get as much time with them while I was growing up, but oh, there was so much love. We felt it from a distance of hundreds of miles. 

I made the dolls first, carrying their bouquets of buttons from Grandma's button box. It came time to cut the silk for their dresses, and my hands weren't sure I meant them to do it. Seventy years that silk sat untouched. Seventy years since it had been cut from the hem of her wedding dress. Back then, the act of cutting this fabric had kept my grandma from tripping on her hem. Now? I was cutting into her dress again. Her wedding dress. There was no room for error.

I kept my cuts as few as possible, sewing six little wedding dresses (two-layer tubes, really, cinched at the waist) from the remnants. I had painted the dolls' hair and eyes to match Grandma's on her wedding day: dark hair, blue eyes; and now, I dressed them one by one. 

One of my step-sisters got married a month ago, and my younger sister will be getting hitched in a couple of weeks. It's all a cycle, you know. This has happened before, and it will happen again. Seventy years from now, some grandchild will be chopping up some memento of one or the other of them to make into something new. Just in time. 

Thanks for reading.

(p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them.)

Linking up to:

I'm Crafty!