You are never too old to learn Chemistry

You are never too old to learn Chemistry
I've discovered that it is actually possible to enjoy that dreaded school subject if you have a passionate and interesting teacher.  Irit Dulman is one of those. She perches on her stool surrounded by eager students ready to learn and experiment and play through her Natural Dyeing Workshop. To put it simply we are learning to dye silk and wool with plants.
With pots of bubbling water and vats of prepared Indigo dye, assorted scales for measuring, spoons, and spatulas and containers of interesting powders and thermometers we watch and assist in deep concentration.
Bye bye Harry Potter. Hello Irit Dulman. To add to the magic she even has a wand to be used to call attention to her budding wizards:-)
We learnt that Indigo leaves create remarkable blues through chemistry . Think of your favourite pair of denim jeans .:-)
We noted that Madder is a root for dyeing red and Weld is a whole plant for yellow dye.
For fabric to absorb strong and permanent colours from the plants, it needs the addition of a mordant. This is a substance to prepare the fabric beforehand. It is a technical and precise encounter with science , as different fabrics require different mordents . The results are fascinating as we compared the brilliant colour samples of  mordanted dyed fabrics with the insipid shades that were unmordanted .
I filled pages with notes, met some wonderful people, and spent two days marvelling at the splendour of natural dyeing.

Curious Conversation

My journey some years ago en route to Curious Conversation started with the idea of creating a merino wool wet felted sculpture, possibly a hollow vessel out of which would emerge a needle felted head. I liked the idea of creation, and birth and wanted to string them together somehow. That was before we started FELT 4U
Did I know how to wet felt a sculpture? No, but I was sure keen to learn. As a student of hands on learning through books, internet and experimenting, I checked out wet felting vessels and thought it looked easy. Oh dear how wrong I was!
After five layers of black and white wool tops over a large copper milk can, that I had bought at a Flea Market in South Africa in the 1980's, I wondered how on earth I was going to wet it down as it had turned into a kind of unwieldy monster.
I read somewhere about using pantyhose when wet felting. As luck would have it, my sister had given me a bag of her old ones. I found something that looked suitable and tried in vain to cover the monster by myself. I was really panting and sweating profusely, but to no avail.
So I invited a couple of friends and together we managed to tame the monster into a flesh colored pair of used pantyhose. .
I hosed it down with soap and water and rubbed for days on end, as it gradually morphed into a
floppy lopsided grey creation with unexplainable openings.
In the meantime I needle felted a head which evolved into a Sci fi bodiless alien from all the
pricking. Certainly not the newborn's head emerging from birthing as I had envisaged.
But I was not yet finished. My floppy lopsided creation needed some weights to ground as well
as to round it, so I felted a dozen balls and put eight inside.
Aha, now we were getting somewhere, the vessel, the head, the balls and me.
To elevate it to its rightful place I put the vessel on a iron thing that I had found somewhere
(I love collecting junk, but that is another story) and put four balls to resemble a baby pram.
Finally the head completed the ensemble or so I thought. But I was wrong. Something was missing. My eyes scanned the horizon of the mess in the workroom and there I found it.
My Egyptian Cat, just waiting to have his say.

Elaine

SPRING ......
2009 is flying.
"Stop the world I want to get off". Is that a song or a movie?. I'm not sure.
What I am sure of is that spring is in the air.
I can smell it in the scented blossoms of the almond trees.
I can hear it in the soft call of early migratory birds heading homeward.
I can sense it in the vibrancy of the fashion colors now dotting the shop displays.
But mainly I feel it in the yearning to be newly creative.
Like two busy bees, FELT 4U's Elaine and Elana are rocking and rolling as we craft our latest merino wool nuno felted garments for Spring/summer 2009.