rubykittyruby

It's a grey Sunday afternoon, and we've had drizzly rain all day.  I walked to church and back this morning, then it was pyjamas on at a ridiculously early time and to heck with anyone who called around unexpectedly!  I spent the afternoon stitching, finishing what I'd intended to be a journal wrap but which might end up as something else.  I'll photograph it tomorrow when the light's better.  Yesterday I added backing fabric and hanging loops to my mini banner, the one I made after the Stitch Art workshop at Leeds Art Gallery.  I also added a few beads to the bottom of the banner, to help it hang nicely.  The beads are fairly ugly grey metallic things that'd come in a scrap pack.  They're quite weighty for their size, and I'd wondered what possible use I could find for them.  Well, as usual, if you hang on to stuff, eventually that becomes clear.   These are two more attempts at dyeing white crochet cotton with Inktense.  I applied...

  I mentioned yesterday that I'd been playing about with my new set of Inktense paints.  These are the skeins of white crochet cotton that I experimented with dyeing.  I painted two skeins with a mix of yellow, red and orange, and a third with blues and green.   The results were mixed, but overall positive.  As you can see, the colours aren't in-your-face vivid, but soft and rather pretty.  I probably could achieve bolder colours with applying a second layer.  How I'd dyed these was to use a water spray and mist the skeins first of all.  Then I applied the Inktense and allowed the crochet cotton to dry out on top of the radiator.  Then, as the Inktense needs a decent amount of heat for the dye to set, I carefully ironed the skeins.  That worked with the orange-yellow skeins, but when I wrapped the blue-green skein around the plastic holder some dye did come off and stain my fingertips.  Maybe I hadn't ironed that as much as I s...