Category Archives: thread

Loose Threads at the Fine Line

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It’s so wonderful to have a local arts center! The Fine Line Creative Arts Center in St. Charles, IL has offered encouragement and support to artisans for decades. Classes include weaving, ceramics, jewelry making, painting, and more. They also have a gift shop and gallery.

The Kavanaugh Gallery at the Fine Line offers about four different exhibits each year. And on October 12 the exhibit, Not Your Mother’s Quilt, opens with an artist’s reception from 6 -8 pm. I plan to be there along with my entry (above), Loose Threads.

These three silk baskets hold thread ravels from fabric and stitching thrums collected over decades. They are a reminder of all the colorful textiles that pass through my hands. Gathering these loose threads together gives me great joy and connects me to my artistic life.

Dyeing for Color

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Here is what I do to make my art. I dye. I iron. I cut. I sew. We are now at the dyeing stage of my artwork. For the next few weeks, I’m dyeing thread for the Artfabrik shop and myself.

My list consists of 31 Artfabrik colorways to dye. The process begins with taking an inventory of the size 8 and 12 pearl cotton threads needed to restock the Artfabrik shelves. Then I begin the process of mixing Procion MX dye powders with water to make the dye stock. (Remember to put the lid on the blender!)

Next is painting the white pearl cotton threads. Each colorway has its own color sequence. (This one is called October Fest.) Sometimes I mix the basic dye stock colors together to get a secondary color. At other times I dilute the dye stock with water to achieve a lighter value of the color. It’s a lot of measuring and whining when I get it wrong.

Then there is the whining about washing them out by hand. It’s a bad idea to throw thread into the washing machine to rid it of excess dye. I know, because I’ve tried it.

So the thread is washed by hand. I collect buckets of water from the washer as I wash clothes or fabric using that water for the initial rinse of the threads. After 5-15 buckets of water or so, I can use clean water to rinse it out. This is usually my morning work out.

The thread bundles must air dry before I begin to twist and label each skein. So you see, dyeing can take weeks. But the colors are worth it!

What to Do with Your Loose Threads

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Need to clean up your studio? Have threads thrums or blobs of thread to get rid of?

Then why not use your loose threads to create a work of art! Here you see three silk baskets I’ve made. They are stitched by hand and machine using even more stray threads that were hanging around the studio.

The baskets are holding a decade’s worth of thread blobs. These blobs or thread ravels were collected after washing fabric I’ve dyed over the years. The couched threads on the baskets are short clips of thread I kept for some reason. So you see it was time to clean up my studio!