March 20, 2016 – Egg Decoration

We had a fun meeting yesterday decorating eggs. Attendees were: Sandy, Marcia, Phyllis, Sharolene, Frank, Sage, Aviva, Ann, and Elaine. Sharolene tried some unsuccessful indigo dyeing on some mystery fabric, Aviva and Sage knitted, Sharolene and Sandy did egg decorating.  Sandy dyed one egg in some older yellow dye, which worked fine, although the dye itself was not reusable any longer. Sharolene and Sandy experimented with a new to them method of dyeing eggs with fingernail polish. It was quite simple. The fingernail polish floated on the surface of room temperature water and the eggs laid on top and the polish stuck to the eggs in delightful ways.  Ann used a silk transference technique where she tightly wrapped an egg with silk and then boiled in vinegar water for 30 minutes. This process transferred the dyes from the silk to the egg. Beautiful.

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Easter Egg Dyeing

We are planning to dye eggs for Easter at our meeting tomorrow. Although we have done this before, sometimes the hard boiled eggs have not fared well. One of our members has given us a tip on how to prepare our eggs for a longer lasting outcome. Here are her instructions:

I do a larger hole on the big end and just a little hole on the small end of the egg; scramble the yolk with the needle, and blow things out the bottom. We always rinsed ours. Bring copper wire to make a ring-and-handle big enough to press your egg down into your dye-cup while it fills with liquid, and to hold it up while it drains again.


We will be posting our results!

February 28, 2016 – Frank’s Shibori Shirts

We had a lovely day outside at Phyllis’s and the results of our resist dyeing paid off in spades with Frank’s shirts. They are stunning. The indigo pot was perfect and they were dipped several times with different members doing the timing after the timer–OOPS–was accidentally dropped in the water.  Once they are dry we need to have good pictures of Frank wearing them.