Paper Cloth with Fiber Junkies

Oh what fun you can have with some cloth and a bunch of paper and tissue scraps with glue to hold it all together! Gen was our guide with her previous experience in making paper cloth that we all admired.

 This is some of the papers we had collected.

 This is my tray with a piece of cloth on it, ready to start. Note the jar and glue. We thinned out the glue and used a sponge brush to apply it to the cloth.

 These are some papers I had cut and torn. I liked the maps and some wrapping paper. After I had laid some paper out, I couldn't wait to get started.

 So I spread the thin glue on the cloth and then added the papers with more glue.

 This is what it looked like after I added strips of tissue paper. Then I painted a really pretty blue wash that Gen brought over the white areas.

That was so much fun that I immediately did another paper cloth. The colors are pretty similar. I really liked the green and aqua tissue paper. More of that same blue paint was added. Do you see the red swirls? That was a tissue paper. I liked the movement of it and added it liberally to my cloth.

 This pink one was made by another fiber junkie, very pretty. Wish I took notes on who made what.

 I like this one with the yellow, made by Gen. You can see hints of her blue paint wash on the light areas.

 After lunch, some of us were inspired to have fun with paper napkins and tissue paper directly on the cloth. So there wasn't any magazine or other paper.  I really liked the striped and plaid napkins and threw in the polka dots and a leafy napkin. Then that same blue paint was added at the end.

Val had a pretty paper napkin at lunch that I really liked. It is the aqua swirl that you see above. I tore it and distributed around the cloth with a floral napkin and map pieces.

Knoxville's Market Scene

There were a lot of food trucks at the Knoxville market.

What fun names they have.

The retro look was popular.

This was a particularly busy truck.

Here is a close-up.

Not too sure about what is painted on this truck.

The market had a lot of cafes also. This one had really bright orange chairs for all the UT fans.

There were dozens of vendors with fresh produce. It all looked wonderful.

So did the plants.

There were two sets of pumpkins, sorted by size.

Just love these huge baskets of flowers.

We bought some of the elongated radishes. Wish I could remember what they are called. Great in sandwiches.

These are mushrooms.

Such pretty colors.

These melons have character.

More mushrooms. The ones above are growing out of the plastic bags.

These are dried.

I didn't know they could grow out of bags, hanging around...

I found all the mushrooms fascinating.

Knoxville and Fiber

We were in Knoxville on a recent Saturday and went to the Market downtown. It was a really busy, fun place to be. I particularly enjoyed the booth where a woman was knitting socks, on a machine! I haven't done any knitting since I was in college, and not much then. But I have been most interested in the knitting of my fiends, particularly hand knitted socks.

It is hard to see the machine well, but you can see the green and orange skeins of wool. They go up through the thread stand that hangs over the knitting device.

The knitter is attached to a painted stool. There is a hand crank to turn the yarn around the inside of the round device.  See the weight hanging below? It holds the sock in place as it is knitted.

In this picture you can see the inside of the round device where all the knitting action is.

Look at these beautiful wool yarns. A few are commercially available, the rest are hand dyed by the knitter.

These are her socks for sale. Aren't they great?!

This is another booth with hand dyed scarves and fabrics sewn into garments.

Indigo Fabric Dyeing, Shibori Style

A few months ago, the Fiber Junkies enjoyed trying their hand at Indigo dyeing, led by Judy. She had shown us some beautiful examples of fabric she had manipulated and dyed.

I thought it would be nice to stitch up some fabric for an indigo dyed shibori.

 This is the fabric I hand stitched before the "big day".

 This is what it looked like after I pulled all the threads tightly and knotted them off.

This is another piece of fabric that I folded, accordion style. Then I placed an old slide on each side of the folded fabric and clamped it all together.  We had each brought a large variety of items to use to fold or scrunch or somehow manipulate the fabric prior to dyeing.

 This is a bucket of water with quite a few of our fabric pieces after they were wrapped and ready to dye. We needed to soak them before putting them in the dye bath.

Here is Denny, ready to go at the buckets.

This is the bucket with the indigo. The bubbly, foamy looking stuff floating on the top is called the "flower".

Judy is removing the flower before we put our fabric in the bucket.

Val stirring the bucket to make sure all our fabric pieces are in the dye. We had 2 buckets going. You can see that the bucket in the back by Judy has a few plastic rods with fabric wrapped on them.

After soaking for a while, Denny removed the fabric from the buckets and we hung them on a clothesline to dry.

 Some of them were so heavy, we laid them on the lawn to dry.

Those extra long gloves Denny brought were really wonderful.

We did two batches of dyeing.

Then we unwrapped our fabrics and hung them to dry some more. Look at all that wonderful fabric.

 Above is a piece of my rusted fabric. See it and another piece of rusted fabric below after the indigo dye?

 Below are 2 more of my pieces.

 The top one I wrapped marbles to create those smallish circular areas. The larger area on the right was a wrapped plastic hair curler. the lower piece was folded. See the funny shapes at the edges? Those are the impressions from paper clips.

 This is the fabric I had sewn and was pictured at the top . On the left you can see where there is still a little thread in the fabric.

 The circular areas on this piece were where I had wrapped empty thread spools.  It was all a lot of fun. The most time consuming part was preparing the fabric.