apres Ayperi, le deluge

Well, here's one way to suddenly have a lot of dye work:

Ayperi decides to have a double veil class in January.

Ayperi inquires about half circle veil pairs from me.

Vashti explains that she has no true half circle veils.

Ayperi decides that's okay, orders a pair of "semi ovals" from Vashti.

Ayperi sends Vashti an email that she has five students who each want a pair of "semi ovals" for the January class! That's ten veils!

Vashti is extremely glad she's taking some vacation the week of Christmas... :-D

reactions worth 1000 words

So, yet another custom veil done with no photograph to show of it. But after I ironed it last night, well, it was bedtime. And after work I had to rush off with it to dance to leave it for AJ at the studio. No photo time! But I did get to show the veil off to some of my studio friends. I got a lot of compliments on it! This veil was a deep red-orange with pale orange streaks edged with black. I named it "Dream of Pele" because it looked so much like a lava flow bounded by black rock. After displaying it to four or five people in the dressing room, I folded it back up (all four yards of it) and then my teacher came in... so I unfolded it again and got a "wow" out of her.

I was bemoaning my inability to keep up with the photography side of this hobby, and she pointed out that quite a number of pictures of my veils do exist -- in photos of dancers. For example the local trio Raya Alimah has performed with three of my veils (above). So it's possible I could talk to them and their photographer for permission to use their photo on my (as yet empty) website. And there's also the idea of possibly having a "Vashti Veils Convention" and getting a whole bunch of local dancers with my veils together and taking pictures of them! That would just rock. No idea how we'd do it -- outside might be best, in the spring? Sigh. One day.

we have the tools

Well, one of my local dancer customers had contacted me about a 4 yard veil a bit ago and today I thought I better get that done going for her, as she needs it quite soon. My usual problem with 4 yarders is that I must hem them myself. Sometimes I even make them unhemmed to avoid this. :-D

Okay, that's not quite correct. Some dancers have told me they prefer them unhemmed because they like max flutter in the ends. But doing that does worry me as they do tend to fray. (Every once in a while on dance boards, somebody comes out and says "Oh, if you have the right silk, they never fray!" Would sure like to know what the heck silk that is.) So I got out my sewing machine today to hem up a bunch of 4yarders to have on hand.

Except... hey, I forgot! I have a new sewing machine! I got a lovely new Janome last year on clearance and have only gotten to use it for one or two projects. Now was my chance to try out its rolled-hem foot and see how it could do on thin 5mm silk. Result: very nice! For one thing it didn't try to suck the fine stuff down into the feed dogs at the beginning. No tension problems. Beautiful even tiny stitches. Unfortunately there's still the problem of correctly feeding the fabric into the rolled-hem foot, which requires some finesse. But overall I think this will be a great improvement... and the likelihood of my 4 yard veils being hemmed is going to increase dramatically.

Martha Stewart rocks

Here's why I say Martha Stewart rocks. She has a dyer on her show who does scrunch dyes. Don't get me wrong, I like shabd's stuff. But Martha apparently made scrunch dyeing sound like some ground-breaking new thing. It's not. Then on her website she gives "directions" for making a similar item yourself (here's an excerpt):

3. Prepare up to six different colored dyes for the gathered areas of the leggings. In each squeeze bottle, mix 2 teaspoons dye with 4 ounces water, then add 4 more ounces to fill.

Then later:

6. Mix three more colors of dye in similar tones (for example: yellow, light yellow, dark yellow) for the background. One by one, completely saturate the leggings with these colors.

Okay, so we have NINE colors of dye, and we have 8 ounces of dye for each. That's 72 oz of dye! And in this craft project, you are dyeing... one pair of cotton leggings.

If I dye multiple tshirts, I calculate about 8 to 12 oz of liquid dye per shirt.

A person following Martha's instructions is going to buy massively more dye (and probably squeeze bottles) than she needs to dye one pair of leggings.

So you rock, Martha! Way to keep dye suppliers in business!