Sewing a Stegosaurus!

For our December meeting, our ASG members are supposed to sew a doll, doll clothes or a stuffed animal for charity.  After hearing the other members make plans for frilly doll clothes, I decided to look for a something a bit more unisex…and what could be more fun than a dinosaur?

He’s made from polar fleece scraps and is entirely machine sewn except for the spot where I stitched him closed after stuffing.  The pattern is from a book I picked up years ago, probably off a bargain table, called Step by Step Art of Making Soft Toys, by Alan Dart.

Dye Resist Experiments — Double Diagonal Clamping

Another double dyed fabric, this time using clamps both times.  This one was folded in squares, clamped diagonally with a pair of ceramic tiles, and dyed fuchsia.  Then I repeated the dyeing, angling the tiles the other way and using cobalt dye.  One tile cracked as I was setting the clamps, which I think caused the line through the white areas at the bottom This has some really cool potential! (As soon as I find something less brittle than ceramic tiles to clamp with…)

Again, I was curious how the color would differ from a mix-and-dye-once dip:

Dye Resist Experiments — Drawing Lines

Trying to get resisted lines, I first used a simple running stitch and drawing the thread tight.  But I couldn’t get it tight enough:

So, I tried again using a running stitch along a fold, which got a double layer of fabric.  Much better:

This is a color experiment as well — I’m beginning to see that dyeing one color over another is not equivalent to mixing the two and dyeing, so I’m starting some tests to see if I can learn what to expect (hah! as if…).  This is the difference between the overdye, with the lines, and the mixed version of the same colors, in the overlay strip.  For these colors, it’s fairly close.

Dye Resist Experiment — Round Clamps

The last time I tried clamping these round wooden disks on the edges of a folded fabric, I just used clips and didn’t get much resist.  This time, I used real clamps.  Much better!

This differs from the disks centered on the fabric stack — the lines through the circles come from the tiny bit of dye that slips between the disks.

Dye Resist Experiments — Mokume Gane

Mokume gane is a wood grain effect created by sewing parallel lines of running stitches then gathering them tightly.

I’m afraid that I didn’t gather tightly enough, and there isn’t much texture on this one.

At least, I think that’s why there isn’t much texture.  I left this one sitting in the dye during curing — I’ll have to try taking it out and see if that increases the resist effect.

Pleat-Resist Dyed Tee

After I got such cool results with pleat binding on a fat quarter of quilting cotton, I got all cocky and tried pleat binding on enough cotton interlock for a tee.  The fabric started out white, was dyed a pale yellow, then pleated:

and dyed with cobalt:

Then made into a tee!

Oh my…who is that dour woman?  I was just home from our monthly ASG meeting and was trying not to cough.  Let’s have a happier pic:

Meet my new assistant Murphy!  He’s 17 weeks old and 25 pounds already!  He went to doggy day care for the first time today and came home a wet noodle!  I think he liked it!

Ombre Attempt

After seeing the results of the ring binding experiment, I wondered if I could get an ombre effect by simply rolling the fabric and dyeing it.  The rolling was simple enough, but I didn’t have a container long enough to lay the roll out, so I had to coil it.  The results are cool, but not ombre.

I’ll have to look for another container.

Dye Resist Experiments — Spider Binding

This is a really traditional shibori design — pinch a bit of fabric and wrap it with thread.  The bound fabric looks rather alien:

I did two pieces of this, one pre-soaked in soda ash and one not.

With soda:

Without:

Not a great deal of difference in detail.

With the green one, I was hoping to mimic some fabric I saw in a picture with was all texture — it’s going to take some practice to figure out how to get the binding closer together without losing any fingers…I wonder if taking some “spikes” to the other side of the fabric would help?