February 2021 - Jane Mercer Felt Artist

It’s time to organise my white fabric stash

Both natural dyeing and eco printing require white fabric and I have been building a disorganised stash. I bought a lot of old tablecloths from the local charity shop during 2019 and early 2020 and mordanted most of it. I even have a stash inventory from about a year ago. Meaningless really as I have not updated it. I stored my stash in numerous plastic blags and in an old blanket chest I got from my mother. Last year in the first lockdown I sewed scrubs for the local hospital and I volunteered to take all the white sheeting we were given, as it wasn’t suitable for making scrubs. This has added to the significantly to the stash. And of course, I have bought lengths of fabric to supplement the recycled material. I have kept my small quantity of silk fabric separate from the rest, and for now, I am not sorting…

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28/02/2021

Fibres / Natural dyeing / Prefelts / Wet felting

My first experiments testing fine wetfelt samples.

I want to make some fine wet felt samples. I have successfully made two large fine merino and silk wet felted wraps, but I am not sure that they have the optimum felt thickness. This is why I am doing these experiments. I am going to make white samples. As I think about this I am reminded of the first blog I wrote ' White out ' I was just starting on an online felting course and I wanted to record my adventures. I was a novice felter and blogger and I lost my white felt in a sea of soap on my white table. You can read it here I have a grey table now so that problem will not reoccur! My large wraps were made with wool layout densities of 4 and 5 mg/cm2. Beautifully thin but hard to layout and prone to thin spots. My new samples will be…

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21/02/2021

Eco Dyeing / eco printing / Fabric / garments / machine stitching / Natural dyeing / sewing

My challenge: Sewing garments with ecoprinted fabric.

I have sewn garments for years but only made garments with eco-printed fabrics for about a year. Eco printed fabric gives me a new challenge: the width of the fabric. I printed eco-fabric that was 42cm wide. Garments normally use 115cm wide fabric. 42cm was limited by my longest pole and the length of my fish kettle. With my new larger fish kettle this has gone up to about 54cm. I looked for interesting garment patterns that could be accommodated by this restriction. I choose a Marcy Tilton jacket pattern My fabric was an old linen table cloth. I cut out the pattern pieces before printing to get round the width limitations. Then I printed the pieces individually using walnut, rose, silverweed and Cornus leaves, and a tannin blanket. Work in progress. Finished jacket The trouser pattern was made up of narrow pieces. I simply sewed my fabric pieces together to get…

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14/02/2021

madder / Natural dyeing / Wool / Woolfest

Can I extract the true red from madder roots ?

For a number of years, I have grown my own madder from a plant that I bought at woolfest from fiery felts. I have tended the plants carefully and as they matured started to harvest the roots. Here is my madder bed looking a bit weedy in the snow. So far using these madder roots I have only been able to achieve peachy reds which I find a bit frustrating. I thought I’d try again. First I read up about the factors which affect the colour extraction process for madder. I reread "Wild Color" by Jenny Dean along with the pages about madder on the website of the wild colours company. I also checked the history of dyeing with madder in the wonderful book "Natural Dye" by Dominique Cardon. What a lot of options there are. True red was the desired red colour to be obtained from madder…

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07/02/2021