Happy Labor Day! Still catching up...

Fiber Fun Day! 

Our third annual Fiber Fun Day happened on the Sunday after I came back from California. For the last three years a few good art friends get together and we do a lot of tie-dying and all kinds of things. It is a day to experiment, have fun, gossip, eat, and have some nice cocktails. I found a new pattern on ravelry.com for weightless produce bags: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/weightless-produce-bag They are fun to knit because they are so quick and they are perfect for purchasing produce. There will be a lot of people getting some of these for Christmas! I knitted four while I was in California for the express purpose of using them for Fiber Fun Day. I'm pretty happy with the result. 

Erin needed new pillow covers. 

Using Popsicle sticks, she folded the fabric for the above pillows. They look fabulous on her new futon!

I also bought some onesies for my niece that I wanted to dye. This was good planning because 1. She had already had a poop explosion on one and it was now, according to my sister, unwearable -  2. My sister was very unhappy because she loved these onesies, and 3. Jesmyn is outgrowing said onsies! 

I love these onesies too! So I had no problem making more. We used RIT clothing dye for most of our projects. Its reliable and easy to use. This year I found a lot of new colors at Joann's. It was super fun to experiment. 

The color on this one isn't showing well, it's a much more subtle gradient. A really gorgeous sunset. 

                         

The really fun onesie was this one. I wish I had made it for my nephew when he was little. It looked like a funny dinosaur when I was done unwinding all the ginko nuts. It still wasn't quite girly enough for me so I added the iron-on bees. Not sure it worked. 

                      

                    

But speaking of bees...

I found some amazing images at work. The Burpee Seed catalogue from 1885 is a treasure! The bee is from a different catalogue, but works quite well here I think. 

I picked up some white Tshirts for my nephew and dyed them to match the image. 

The giant bee: 

The American Grown Prizetaker Onion:

Peas:

The Small Sugar Pumpkin


The iron-on before:


Other iron-ons cut and ready.

I'm so thrilled with the results of all of these! My niece and nephew are going to be the coolest kids in school! 

First Day of Spring

and its snowing.

FOOEY!

I'm just coming off of my wonderful week of vacation (stay-cation), my first day off since going back to work, wanting to get in the garden and do oodles of things, also a bike ride would have been nice. But no. Snow instead. 

So I'll just reminisce about my wonderful week last week.
My sister is expecting. The baby shower is this coming weekend and I've been agonizing over what to do. She lives in southern California. Knitting would be the obvious answer (for me) except - it would be kind of a waste of time. It's too warm for the knitting (it was 93°F last week!). I don't know how it came to me, but I realized I should do some t-shirt transfers onto some onesies. It was so much fun!  I think this kid is going to have more onesies that he will know what to do with. 

 

Now I have a question for you, who's bright idea is it to give a baby WHITE onesies? Won't they be stained the first time the child wears it? I have tons of RIT clothing dye, so I chose my favorite boy-colors (which irks me because there shouldn't be boy-colors and girl-colors and don't even get me started on those awful pastel baby-colors - yuck!) but anyway, ranting aside, I chose Blue, Kelly Green, and Yellow. 

 

I decided to try my hand at tie-dying two of them and am thrilled with the results! I just boiled everything on the stove-top for about 1/2 hour. Maybe I should have done the green longer, it has become a very light green after washing. But that's okay.

Then came the hard/fun part - choosing what to put on the plain onesies! Originally I had wanted to use some images I've been collecting from work.

There are some great mechanical drawings, compass roses and the penny-farthing! I was also joking with a friend that since I live in Philadelphia I have to send one with the Eagles logo on it. Then of course, I'd have to balance that out with one with the Lakers logo on it (See - 'cause I'm from Southern California and when I was a six-year-old at Sports Camp - Magic Johnson came and made us all swear to be Lakers Fans for life. I take that kind of thing seriously.)  But the dyed colors didn't come out quite like I had expected and so I decided to skip those.

As I was pondering how to decide on more images, I remembered some of my dad's drawings. My dad has a natural gift for drawing. His latest project has been to draw initials for as many people as he knows. Has he passed the 1000 mark yet? I'm not sure. Putting an initial on the onesie is an obvious choice. But my sister is keeping the baby's name a secret until he arrives. We don't know the first initial and so my dad has not drawn one for him yet. What I do have are all of the little tags my dad whips up for Christmas gifts.  Each one has a tiny little drawing on it (these are all around and inch tall or so).

I was able to narrow it down to the few I thought would scan well and be the cutest for a little baby onesie. 

I scanned them at a high dpi, blew them up, cleaned them up, and chose my three favorite. 

 

 

  

 For the two plain dark blue ones, I didn't think the line drawings would stand out so I still had to find something different. I remembered a process I liked very much, bleach stenciling. I found two images on the internet I wanted to use and tried it out. It didn't work. I think it might be because I used a non-chlorine bleach. That's okay - I have time to try it in the future. For now, I decided I still liked what I wanted to stencil so I printed those up instead. An interesting thing happened as I was ironing them on. When the area I had bleached heated up, the color changed a bit - now that area is a sort of lavender color. And I think it works.

I did end up using the penny-farthing which I just love. I used the same image on a t-shirt for my dad for Christmas. Now they can be twins! 

 

The tie-dyed onesies came out much better than I'd dared hope. I think they are also adorable. 

 

 

It is taking all of my self control not to race to Target and buy more onesies and to not call my dad and ask him to whip up some more drawings so I can make more. I think I should hold off until my nephew actually arrives and we can see how this first batch was received. Right size? Did I fix the color okay?  It would be terrible if I inadvertently turned him navy blue.