Saturday, January 02, 2010

2010: The Year of Stitching Dangerously

Or the year designers email me and beg me to "please stop posting pictures of my WIP on this blog because between my poor photography and the liberties I take with their designs, I'm causing people to in fact not purchase their patterns!"

2010's first victim of 1)bad photography and 2)my first attempt for the year at dyeing my own fabric, Plum Street Samplers Garden of Eerie:



The fabric is supposed to be Lakeside Linens Vintage Sand Dune. I decided to attempt to dye my own fabric and please let us remember that I have very little experience in dyeing my own fabric, do not have a clue what I'm doing and am a fly by the seat of my pants kind of girl. I did not photograph the dye process because seriously is it really that interesting to see fabric in a pot of colored liquid?

I am happy with the color and the picture above is as close as I could come to an accurate representation.

Mistake #1:

I only had yellow RITS dye in powder form. I wasn't thinking and dumped the whole pack of powder in the trusty dye pot. So yeah, my white linen became a solid golden yellow. Whoops.

Mistake #2

See mistake #1

Mistake #3

I kept adding splashes of liquid Ritz dye in Tan which made it less yellow but kind of deepened the whole sand idea to more of a orangey brown sand. You know like a clay sand instead of a beachy sand. But the color is nice and warm and somewhere between light sand linen and tobacco linen.

Why is this the year of stitching dangerously? Because I plan to do more fabric dyeing. I'm going to throw caution to the wind and dye my little heart out. I hope to think it through a little better next time instead of just jumping off the dye pot cliff, but dyeing my own linen is going to be part of my 2010 stitching experience.

I'm also going to lighten up about switching fibers. As long as I have my trusty DMC color card I should be able to convert almost any thread in any design and I need to embrace that side of stitching. Use my creativity and make sure each design has a little bit of me in it.

Public Service Announcement

Attention All Cross Stitch Designers:

Be afraid, be very afraid.....but I love you all and thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing your talent with me and all the other cross stitchers around the globe. I am so very sorry in advance if my artistic license(and I use that term very loosely) causes sales of your designs to plummet.

PS: I was not drinking and blogging but I was talking on the phone while blogging. And yes I was indeed horrified at all my typos and errors in the first posting of this blog entry. YIKES!

9 comments:

Missy Ann said...

I think the fabric looks great. In the big version I can see the mottling of the colors.

I would also like to state I'm insanely jealous that you've started this. I want to start mine, but I have stitcher's ADD and never manage to do what I say I'm going to.

Deb said...

Ha, Melissa - I don't think that your pictures have caused sales to fall at all. I commend you for being brave enough to get those Rit bottles out and go for it. I think that your fabric looks great and the more you do it, the more you'll learn how to get the exact look you want. I've only tried the tea/coffee dying and it is a heart clenching experience when you first start out!

Margaret said...

Oooh, I love how your Garden of Eerie is looking! I think the fabric is great! It'll be fun to follow your dyeing odyssey this year. :D And taking license with the colors of designs is fun to see. I can't do it myself, but I'm looking forward to seeing what you do! Have fun!

Laurie in Iowa said...

Great start on your Garden of Eerie. I think the linen looks fine!

Meadows08 said...

Love this post! I don't think I'll ever be brave enough to dye my own fabric!

Siobhán said...

YGG! I was going to start mine but am limiting my WIPs to about 4 at a time. I started BBD Midnight Watch so will start Garden when it's done. I think your fabric looks great, btw!

xeyedmary said...

Love your fabric and can't wait to see more home-dyed!
You should see what I did with Plum Street Samplers "Creepy Kids"- OOOPs! I mean "Fruit of the Loom" OOOps I mean "Fruit of the Spirit". I totally deleted the weird kids and added my own graphics to the foreground. And I kept referring to it as "Creepy Kids". I'm sure Paulette has blacklisted me!

Brigitte said...

Oh Melissa, I love your piece of fabric and I think <ou couldn't have done better for the project you use it for.
Have fun with this project and firtheron with dying more fabric and converting threads and colours. Sounds like an adventure, lol.

Nicole said...

Great start Melissa. I think you did a great job with the fabric! You can also use Rit Dye Remover (smells like perm solution) to take color out of fabric you have dyed. I have done it often I have also done it with stitching on it and it didn't remove the color from the threads. You may not want to try this on this particular piece because you have so much done, but maybe in the future. Good luck! :)