The Art Alchemist's Guild

It works! Here's mine:

The lower piece, which looks nearly black, sat overnight in a cold dye bath of Rit Red Wine, liquid, for organic fibres. The upper piece only spent 5 minutes in the same bath, but hot. Just to show the variety of colours you can get out of one dye.

I dye burlap scraps for use in other projects, mainly for texture in wet felting.

My drop spinning hobby just got an upgrade. I bought this entirely because I spun one of my spindles in the wrong direction and didn't want to re-spin it by hand.

Yarn is usually made of two threads that turn into each other, the tension holding them together to make a stronger, straight thread. Spinning only creates one thread that needs to be twisted with another to make the actual yarn, or else it tangles with itself.

Bellow my first ball there, you can see my spindles (chopsticks and a paintbrush) hand-wrapped from my drop spindle, which isn't shown here. The red is spun from uncombed loose locks of wool, usually called "teasewater locks."

I've modified brushes, but never made my own. All I know is I'm long overdue for a haircut.

A local, independently owned yarn store partnered with the Little Free Library Project to create free fibre libraries around the city, providing yarn, needles and other fibre arts supplies to the community.

Edit: I forgot the link! https://baaadannas.com/little-fibre-library-resource-page/

This article covers the science, culture and history, as well as the how-to for a basic bark basket.

Bottom: Iron mordant adjunct

Middle: Copper mordant adjunct

Top: Aluminum Sulfate adjunct

Jar: Bubbling lake pigment

Left corner: Used sandpaper

I have a potato phone.

But they are all peachy colours. The jar is stained red from other dyes, it doesn't come out.

Wool roving usually starts to felt during this process, I have carders to fluffy it back up after.

Don't do it.

It made my whole kitchen smell like old eggs and the colour just wasn't worth it, and that was before the aluminum sulfate.

But I'll probably try it again with different wools and mordants...

Anyway, I peeled about 300g from paper birch trees (respectfully, a little bit from each tree,) and soaked it in water for two days. Then, I simmered it on low heat a couple hours, let stand another day (I was busy) then added about 50g wool I'd mordanted with soda ash.

The wool simmered for a couple hours then sat in the dye bath for another day. After that, I rinsed, tried some different mordants, then added aluminum sulfate solution in water to the dye bath to extract the rest of the pigment... which really made it smell like rotten eggs. I'm in the frozen north with my door wide open, now.

Maybe I'll try again in the summer time.

I'll break down and recycle the spent bark into paper as well. Stay tuned for that.

Crayons are the wax counterparts to pastels, and, even though they're associated with rough childhood sketches, even fine artists have used crayons from the early Renaissance to today.

You're not limited to sketching, either. You can use them in encaustic paintings, melt them with a wick into candle moulds, or melt and mix them with hot glue to make bottle sealing wax, or wax for seals.

Where: Robertson Branch Library (1719 S. Robertson Boulevard)

When: Monday, Feb 23rd, 6 pm

Join Waldorf Handwork Educator Brie Wakeland Muszynski for a hands-on workshop on how to sustainably create beautiful, naturally dyed fabric using various local plant species. In this workshop, participants will utilize black walnut and toyon plant material to dye a napkin/bandana to take home.

I've had all the ingredients for this for about a month now. I will post here once I get around to actually making it. Has anyone else made soap? How did it go?

From the rule of thirds to the Fibonacci sequence to pomegranates, math and symbols are all over art. Éliphas Lévi was big on occult symbolism while Alex Grey is all about the spirituality. What symbols or "rules" do you find most interesting?

Actually, I made about three dozen with a new mold I just got today.

I save all my cleanly split walnut shells to make tiny boxes, but sometimes only one half survives. After collecting a bag of them, I used them to recycle my spent candles.

This is a test. I read that fermenting lichen in ammonia for about six months creates a natural fabric dye that doesn't require a mordant.

This is actually test 2, since I tried to precipitate the dye out of test 2 and ended up making poison piss instead.

Colours range from yellow to red to purple depending on the process and type of lichen. I don't know lichens, so I just threw whatever in there and hoped for the best. You can see the ammonia turned very dark, so I think it worked.

TBD if it actually dyes, I'm waiting till it's warm enough to open a door before I start boiling ammonia in my kitchen.

I've been using sushi rollers the transport my brushes since art school and finally decided to make my own brush-roll-up.

Wet felting is the process of using soap, hot water and mechanical agitation to coax wool fibres to knit together. I dyed some burlap and cheesecloth to work into the fibres as well, 'cause I love texture.

Here's a pic of the inside — all criticism for brush care can go to my twelve year old niece.

I'm good at a lot of things. Sewing isn't one of them.

This started when I got a pattern to use up the box of felt from my failed wet felting experiments. Since I already mastered The Dryer Ball, my hubris led me to believe I was ready for multi-cellular organisms.

And I was. He's my handsome fox man.

I go through a ton of envelopes every spring when I pack my seeds for annual plant exchanges and the seed library at the book library, so I learned how to make my own.

This is one of a few styles I use.

If you garden or can fit a pot of soil in your living space, remember to check your local libraries for seeds, lots of them host a free exchange.

Or, this could be a use for all that paper we made last month. Because everybody made paper with me, right? https://lemmy.today/post/44387660?scrollToComments=true

I searched for a good plant-based alternative, finding this article among the few without strong politics mixed in: https://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/top-headlines/tallow-beeswax-and-other-wonders-making-candle-wax-at-home/

Yes, that site posts pseudoscience and leans toward conspiracy theories, but the unfortunate fact is the venn diagram for homesteaders, survivalists and libertarians is nearly a circle. I'll take the know-how and leave the rest.

The plant info is further down in the Off the Grid article, for our vegan/vegetarian pals, since the Food Republic article rides hard on the meat train.

If you have better sources or first-hand knowledge, please share!

I met a group of artists this week who are honing in on their weakest skills in order to force each other to work on them, no matter how painful it is.

It's easy to work on the things you're good at, and much easier to give up and forget when you don't succeed on the first try.

So, what do you suck at? Is there a reason? Would you ever try to improve?

Most are from lake pigments, with a few earth pigments in the mix.

From the top left, reading right:

Top row: Red roses, iron oxide, greens from florist waste, cranberries

Middle row: Red roses (again,) red cabbage, kyanite, lemons

Botton row: Spinach and corriander, just spinach, beets, agate grindings (from my rock tumbler)

These are just the ones I managed to get potted and dried, I have a whole box of mixed paints waiting on another order of watercolour pots.

They all look a bit different in consistency in part because I've tried a few different formulas of watercolour mix, and because they're made from different things. Cranberries and red cabbage always end up a bit "sticky."

My latest formula for watercolours is:

• 300g Gum Arabic Solution (gum arabic powder and water)
• 280g Glycerine
• 20g Clear honey
• 20 Drops clove oil (antibacterial - paints will mold)

I mix into pigment at a 1:1 ratio by weight.

I'm not a shill and this isn't an advertisement.

I was put off by the fact that you have to make an account on Ravelry to see anything, which is why it took me so long to start using it.

But it really is the best archive of patterns and advice for literally everyone. It's community-driven with I don't even know how many folks sharing patterns for free, with whole active forums to ask any question, and ways to organize favorites.

I know I sound like a shill. I just fucking love ravelry.

I recently posted in !cool_rocks@lemmy.today about the lapis lazuli a rockhounding buddy sent me.

But I wanted to destroy it.

My goal was to create the original ultramarine pigment of renaissance artists. After a few failed tries manually, I ordered a rock tumbler and — since lapis lazuli is SUPER hard and I didn't want to have to separate grit from pigment, I got steel paint mixing balls to grind it down. That way I can separate any steel bits at the end with a magnet.

After a week, the pieces look like this. It's so pretty I'm keeping these to polish and turn into, I donno, a necklace or witchcraft or something, while I let the balls work on the rest of the bits.

Once it's finished and filtered, I'll share the depressingly small amount of pigment I get out of this weeks-long process.

I built one of these for art supplies — literally out of an old school locker. Anything can be a free library of you fill it with free stuff.

I make avocado dyes and pigments all the time. In fact, dying and pigments are the main reasons I eat so many vibrant fruits and vegetables. I get a lot of fibre.

I keep a jar of water, avocado skins and pits on my kitchen counter that I add too whenever I have one. I keep ot slightly alkaline with baking soda, which seems to deter bacteria growth.

Different kinds of fabrics take to the dye in different ways, with cotton being my favorite so far. Plant based fibres seem to do better with a urea treatment before dyeing, and you can get some very deep, dark purple/grays with iron mordant (I keep steel wool soaking in salt water.)

The fact that loofah aka luffa is actually a vegetable is always the biggest shock to people when you tell them they can grow their own luffa sponges; the fact that they grow on land, not in the water.

I know what I'm filling my garden with this year.