Here be dragons!

Beach glass is a a fun medium to work in. 

In Australia we mostly get browns, greens, light blues and whites: all of the different bottles of wine and beer that you can buy (and sometimes throw overboard when you go fishing 🐟). 
During the war all kinds of things were also dumped in the ocean around us, including a lot of glass bottles. Occasionally you can find whole, tiny bottles washed up. Mostly it's broken glass though.

I pick it up off the beach, wash it but don't tumble to smooth it at all, and use the different pieces for different projects. Usually about a third of my haul is too sharp to use for jewellery, so I have made lamps and other things.

The most fun by far have been the dragons 🐉.

I've made a few dragon friends for people over the years, and one also inhabits a shelf in our bedroom. 

Meet Sebastian!

I start with a skeleton: an outline of wire and "ribs" that the pieces of glass are wired onto. I use the odd edges of each piece to snag the wire, twisting it around several times until I was sure that it was caught.  
All of my glass pieces pass a "shake" test before they leave me - you don't want things falling apart!

Like mosaic, the glass pieces don't fit together perfectly, so I wire beads between them to complete it. Some of the dragons, like Sebastian, have tongues inside mouths full of sharp teeth, and a spiky spine all the way down to their individual tails. 
Sebastian's tail is a green and white glass pendant.

One dragon with a row of Chinese ceramic beads could even wrap his body around your shoulders. He had goofy eyes, so I named him Mingo . 

A pair of lovely ladies bought him at a craft fair as a present for their eclectic friend. They came back to look at him three times! The dragons certainly catch your eye 👀

His tongue is a piece of Bamboo coral.

Barberella was a commission: a lovely bluish-white dragon with chunky glass feet and a section of a Toohey's New beer bottle in the middle of her forehead. 

 I think her spine started its life as an elven crown, but I like where it has ended up.

Then there was a dragon for my brother, though this one was made from beads rather than glass. I also used a broken wind chime: the long copper pieces that make up his legs. A packet of plastic Autumn leaves are his spine, and he has bone beads as eyes. This funky little guy still lives on the window sill in my brother's bedroom.

The dragon that took the longest though was the Leafy Sea Dragon for my mum. Packets and packets of beads and I still ran out! If you look too close at the beads towards the tail you can see where I filled it with what I had, rather than matching beads.

The colours worked well, as did all of the leafy bits coming off him.

Getting the stripes to line up was a challenge, but I was incredibly happy with the results. I put it together as a surprise... but got busted finishing it when mum came home early one day.

The last member of this odd family was called Motley. 

Because that is exactly what he was. I had a collection of glass that had sharp edges - some lovely, clear pieces that you could never wear without cutting yourself. So I sat down one afternoon without much of a plan and started piecing him together.

His jaw is crooked and his colours are all over the place. I used leftover beads to fill his gaps, so he has a red and white belly, and pink bits, brown bits, blue bits too. 

His eyes do match, but he has a funny little copper tail that looks a bit like a dragonfly. You can kind of see a sun on his right shoulder as well, which I had made for fun and decided to use to fill a gap on him. Almost like a tattoo. A blue and green flower covers part of his face too.

I had him on display at a market stall one day and to my surprise he sold. Someone fell in love with his motley little face and he found a new home.

I have a box of glass here at home. I think it's time I pulled it out and made another drake. Sebastian could do with a girlfriend.

Maybe brown, with the bottoms of beer bottles as his belly and the necks of bottles as his tail?

Or green, with shiny green beads and stringy, leafy bits coming off him.

I wonder what their names will be?

Easy Alterations

How often do you find something to buy, or order something online, and it isn't quite right?

Or you wear and wash a dress three times and the hem falls down?
A friend says it's definitely three times: that's the magic number that denotes the falling of a hem.

I don't buy garments anymore that require anything other than minor alterations like the ones below. You don't want to spend $100 on a dress only to spend another $100 (including materials and hours of your time) making it wearable. 

If I buy clothes online, I will buy a size larger because it is always easier to take something in than it is to try to add to it and make it bigger. I'm also a size bigger on the bottom than the top, so no dress will fit me perfectly.

I also live in a hot climate, promoting me to buy natural fabrics like cotton and silk to wear rather than polyester. You can cook eggs on the roads here when it's hot, what do you think that does to the plastic you're wearing? Avoiding adding layers to clothes is a must.

My most common alterations are:

• taking pants up
• hemming dresses
• sewing buttons back on
• putting darts in the tops of dresses
• shortening straps on dresses
• closing openings on blouses to make them more modest
• adding lace to the bottom of a dress to make it longer

This is my messy (aka creative chaos-stricken) work space at home. 

I am set up so that my machine and overlocker are always out, as well as the dressmakers manikin. The ironing board is hiding in the corner (though I hate ironing, I will do it for quilting but not clothes!) and there are projects everywhere.

But having everything set up means that I can do quick alterations as needed. Particularly helpful if something breaks half an hour before you want to walk out the door!

Eco Dyeing at Home

After a successful eco dyeing workshop, my mum and I decided to try it at home.

We both trawled the op-shops and came up with a selection of clothes in cotton and silk, and in white, cream and grey. One was even pink, very pale pink. Lighter coloured fabrics have the best results.

We used the same method as the workshop I attended here.

Something to note is that not all leaves and plants will dye or print. In general for this method, things with stronger scents are better, and firm leaves (like gum leaves). A lot of Australian native plants fall into this category.

First try

We did use some rubber bands and rope instead of string.

Pot boiling gum leaves.

Scattering tea leaves and wrapping gum leaves in. 

Whole thing wrapped around an old chair spring.

Simmering away on the stove. The dye bath is a nice brown colour.

You can see the different colours coming through, about halfway into the boiling process (takes 45 minutes).

One pot was darker than the other.

Rinsing in a cool bath after 45 minutes.

And the unwrapping! The silk just takes up the colours in an amazing way. Look at all the copper brown that came from the tea leaves!

This is the same silk top when it had been washed and dried.

Mum's pale pink top was the best of the bunch by far!

This was my best one. I wrapped it around a horse shoe and the shape came through perfectly!
It was a light cotton top in white, now it's grey, black and brown. You can see a bit on the left as well where the stitching of the pattern took up a darker colour. This often happens with different materials on the same garment.

All in all a good day's dyeing. But we still had clothes leftover that hadn't fit into the two pots. So we did another day!

Second try

We put our mordant pot aside and covered it, leaving all of the extra printing leaves in it to soak as well as a rusty chair springs.

Repeated the wrapping and tea-scattering process.

Our rusty things were a lot stronger this time, after being soaked in the mordant for 2 more days.
The dye pots were black as a result.

And what results we got from it. Those leaves that soaked for an extra two days? Amazing prints!!!

Another lightning storm, on a cotton shirt that is going to a good home 😃

Things to try next for different colours and patterns:

• red onion skins can give a pink colour
• cycad leaves for their fabulous shape
• not wrapping around rusty things so that more of the brown colour comes through
• apparently a dye pot of basil can give a purple colour!

Bunting Flags Everywhere!

A great use for leftover fabrics is flags. 

A couple of friends and I do a cancer fundraiser each year, so in 2016 we decided to pool our fabric stashes and create strings of flags to sell.

Bunting flags are very easy to make, and we cheated big time. Pinking shears/scissors. 

These scissors have serrated edges that cut a pattern in your fabric. It's a quick-fix for the edges of fabric, as it cuts it on angles and slows the fraying process. Rather than hemming hundreds of individual flags, we just cut them out! You can see the serrated edge below. 

Using scraps of fabric, I sewed lines for the flags to hang from, just folding the material over and catching as many rough edges as I could. Buying ribbon or bias tape to use would have been terribly expensive, and mean that less could go towards charity.

Some of the end results:

The ones in Indigenous fabrics were the best sellers, but some others were quite popular too. As we had permission to hang them and sell them at work, a few are also up around people's offices! Whatever makes you happy ☺

We made several hundred dollars from sales, and used the leftover flags to decorate our team tent on the fundraiser night as well. Unfortunately it poured with rain.... they held together though!

Eco Dyeing Workshop

Every time I said to someone over the last month, 'Oh, I went to a dyeing workshop' I got blank and then horrified looks.

'DyEing' not 'dying' 💀 was the explanation that followed.

Before Christmas I did an eco-dye workshop with artist Aly de Groot. You can look up her website here: http://www.alydegroot.com.au/ 

She creates all sorts of wonderful things, including using ghost nets (abandoned nets found in the ocean) to weave jellyfish, and dyeing clothing with tea, gum leaves and more! 

What we used for the workshop was:

• Mordant: a substance, typically an inorganic oxide, that combines with a dye or stain and thereby fixes it in a material. We used 50% water, 50% vinegar, and rusty objects in a bucket. We also soaked any leaves that we wanted to print with in this bucket. It smelt atrocious!
• Fabric: cotton or silk. I had a cotton dress, a silk shirt, and a men's silk tie.
• Dye pot: gum leaves, lots and lots of gum leaves. We pre-boiled the pots with as many leaves as we could fit in. They created a brown dye.
• Patterns and printing: gum leaves, grevillea leaves, rusty wire, rusty trampoline springs, rusty nails, loose tea leaves
• String, to tie the bundles up

The pot on the left is the gum leaves boiling.
 

The process

1. Pre-soak the fabric in the foul-smelling bucket and wring it out.

2. Lay the fabric out on the table, and on half of it: 

• Scatter tea leaves on it if you want a copper/brown colour in patches.
• lay leaves out if you want their shapes to print on the fabric
• place rusty items if you want a black colour

3. Fold the fabric over and repeat step 2, continually laying out, scattering and folding until you have a small shape left.

4. Tightly roll this shape up into a bundle and secure with string. If you wrap it tightly, the string will create white lines where the dye cannot get to the fabric. It's a great effect.

These are my bundles. I also wrapped rusty wire around the outside, which gives a black colour. You can see that I got tea leaves everywhere...

 

5. The bundles go into the pre-boiled gum leaf dye pot, to simmer for 45 minutes.

If some of the bundle is sticking out of the water, you will get a different colour on it.

You can see the trampoline springs that some of us wrapped our bundles around, and plenty of leaves!

6. We tipped the pot and bundles out into a water bucket to cool them, then unwrapped each bundle to see how they had turned out.

We washed them off with a hose to get rid of the tea and leaves.

This is my cotton dress.

7. Let the fabric dry naturally, out of the sun (sun is terrible for clothes, really, it eventually bleaches anything). 

8. Once it has dried, hand wash with shampoo to help fix it. Let it dry naturally again.

9. At this point I then machine-washed my items. It is better to continue to handwash, especially silk items, but I was going to sell one of mine to a friend so I needed to know that it wasn't going to run colour anymore.

I was very happy with all three items, but particularly the silk shirt that appears to have a lightning storm on the back!

 

You can clearly see the gum leaves that I wrapped in the middle of the silk shirt:

The brown here is from the tea leaves, the black from the mordant and the trampoline spring:

The men's tie came out great as well. I put a lot of tea in it, and a couple of gum leaves.

I love that I got a whole leaf print on it!

The cross-hatch on the reverse side is from a rusty piece of metal that I wrapped the tie in.

The cotton dress retained more cream than I thought it would, but I did wrap it very tightly.

The lines are from the string that I wrapped around the outside.

There is a great range of colour in the skirt - even some green-ish patches!

Next: to try it myself at home! I continue to scour the op shops for clothes to practice on.