Altered By Me

I love this little kewpie image from Paper Imagery Designs . The kewpie images can be used for almost any theme.  I have some new PID images to play with and I managed to find some time to create a couple of small pieces of art. My arty time is very limited these days. I am helping with my two young granddaughters during the day. One is 7 months old so all of you mothers out there know how hard it is to do anything when babies are this young. Here is a 4 x 4 I made   And here is an atc to I made for the PID weekly challenge And for all of my readers that are enjoying my natural dye experiments I am dying some fabric using an herbal tea. This first batch of fabric has not been treated with a mordant. After it soaks for a couple of days I am going to dye another batch of fabric with the same jar of liquid using material that has been treated with alum as the mordant.    I am hoping to get a real dingy vintage looking maroon but the fun part of these experime...

Lemon Balm Dye Experiment Over the weekend I cut back a pot of lemon balm I have growing on my porch. My intention had been to bundle it up and hang it to dry. After two days of watching it dry in a big unruly clump on my kitchen table I decided to see what kind of dye I might be able to get from the bunch. I'm not having much luck getting a good picture. This is what happens if I don't pull my camera out and snap those pics first thing in the morning. The above picture is as close to the true colors as I could get today. Back to the dye..So I filled a medium pot about half way and threw the lemon balm leaves and stems in. I let it come to a boil and then I turned it down to simmer. My house smelled beautiful, nice and lemony. My husband complained about the smell. I have cooked down lemon grass in the past so I could use the fibers to make handmade paper and the smell was truely horrible. So even though the lemon balm just had a nice lemony smell ...

Dyeing with natural dyes are very easy. In my last post I showed you how you can use onion skins to dye fabric. Today I am going to show you the color dye you can get from using grapevine stems. Grapevine grows wild here where I live and I know it grows in a lot of places in the US. If you don't have any wild grapevine handy I am sure you could cut apart one of those grapevine wreaths everyone had hanging in their house years ago. They are still very popular and can be found in most craft stores. Below is a picture of two pieces of fabric. The white fabric is what I used in the dye bath. I am using the solar dyeing method which means I place my dye material in a glass jar and place it out into the sun. I happen to live in Florida and the sun is still very strong. If it is cold where you live you can try boiling the stems to release the dye. It will depend on the natural dye material used when you will start to see the water turn color. It took about three days for me to se...

Pot of onion skins with fabric My interest in hand dying things started way back in 2000 when I first started making handmade paper. It's fun to throw a handful of flowers into your pulp and watch your paper fibers turn from white to pale pink or purple depending on the type of flower you have added to your fibers. I still make paper every year but now I am enjoying myself experimenting with natural dyes for my fabric and trims. Most arty people have probably already coffee or tea stained some paper or fabric to use in their art. Or maybe you have used walnut ink, which is also a natural dye and can be made relatively easy at home. Lace, Muslin, Cheesecloth and Cotton Fabric dyed with onion skins A very simple way to dye fabric yellow is to use onion skins from a yellow onion. I have read that you can also use purple onion skins but I have never tried myself. When one ventures into the world of hand dyeing from nature and you start your search for information like...