To those of you who are still enduring a frigid winter, I apologize for this photo –
In Anaheim, we still aren’t quite done with Fall yet, as evidence by these leaves I picked up on the way to the studio yesterday evening. They came from two trees in my side yard that still have a lot of leaves. Although the leaves are finally starting to fall fast and furious, it looks more like October in my yard, than late January. The biggest leaf is particularly striking. Notice the dots of red – if we hooked a leaf like that I suppose everyone would just assume that we used artistic license for the color scheme. It would be easy, however, to replicate this leaf with a pancake dye application. While I did not have time to mix up any dye last night to come up with an illustration, here is a piece of wool dyed by that technique.
When I dyed this wool, the soaked piece of wool was laid flat in a pat. Different colors of dye were mixed up, then spooned on to get the look I wanted. If dyeing the spotted leaf shown above, my dye colors would have been yellow, gold, brown and a red. On a piece of wool 4 times longer than the leaf, I would have replicated the sections with my dye: brown edge, gold area with red dots, bleeding to mostly gold > yellow, with brown on the edge. (This technique is described in the category section.) Of course, once everything was done, the wool would have to be hooked in sequence to keep the color fields together.
Although this is not supposed to be the leaf … or a hooked example of the wool shown above, you can see how the wool colors on another piece of pancake dye stayed together when the wool strips were hooked sequentially – in the order of how they were cut. It is a great technique that lets you paint your wool with dye.
I am spending all my free time this weekend finishing up the studio makeover … so I can show you the finished product on Monday.
