community of dyers

It was so sad when Michael Fowler's forums closed. I hope that he will find a way to bring them back online. If not, we have no way to communicate with anyone from that list, unless we exchanged private mail via our other addresses. Let's not let that happen again. Any server can go down, so you should always save your own copy of any info that is very important to you, such as your own posts and your friends' email addresses.

It would be great if you'd post your e-mail address here in Member Talk. I'd suggest that you munge your address so that people can read it, but spam robots cannot harvest it. The best way to do this is to spell out the funny characters. For example, you can always send me mail at

     dyestuff [at] pburch [dot] net .

Here are the pictures of the new menu tests I did yesterday, from the posts that were lost in the database crash....

There was added fallout this morning from the outage a few days ago. The database for this forum was somehow corrupted. When the hosting service fixed the problem, they must have reverted to a backup of the database from a week ago. It's kind of horrifying how badly all these database-driven forums can crash. I know most websites these days are database-driven, but I still like using hard-coded html for my other pages, since they don't really need the advantages provided by a database, as a forum does.

Before they restarted everything, I could see that someone had posted a message about the menus last night, about 1 am US Central time, but I never got to see what it said or even who wrote it, because clicking on the link wouldn't work.

There was a post by tigerb, I recall, giving helpful feedback on which of two new menu designs I should try. There were two wonderful posts by Pia and Tiger with encouragement I badly needed. How I wish I'd saved off a copy of those! They were in reply to a post I made about an email from an unusually ungrateful site user. And Deb wrote an update about her mostly successful attempts to touch up those browns that didn't turn out right the first time.

There was also a post I made about the use of potassium dichromate as a wood dye. I can probably reconstruct most of that one, later on.

Is there anything else that got lost?

Paula

Hello Everybody,

I have worked with dye and prints for more than 15 years. We have a very small community of dyers in South Africa and I am keen to network with more people who work with the medium.

If you would like to take a look at my work, visit my websites...

http://www.handcraftedcolor.co.za Arts & Crafts
http://www.handcraftedcolour.co.za Fashion & Decor
http://www.craftersclasses.co.za

Have a great week in colour!

Kind regards
Melanie

Just curious... I've seen a couple links in signatures, but was wondering who all has blogs on this site. Anyone want to post links here?

I was out of town for most of a week and fell way behind on the hand dyeing Q&A blog (I thought I would be able to post to it from another computer, but it didn't work). I'm glad to see all the good advice here on the forum on mixing rust dye colors and on group projects.

Paula

If you ever have any trouble logging in or posting here, please let me know.

-Paula

A reminder for everyone: your registration to join this forum will not work if your email bounces back.

I'm betting that recent registrant "tiedyetricia" is for real, given her name, which is quite unlike the usual run of names used by the huge number of robospammers who register here. Unfortunately, messages sent to her come bouncing back with the error message "Invalid recipient".

If you see this, TieDyeTricia, please email me from another email address.

-Paula

Wow, we are getting a lot of robospammers registering for the forum. There are only two real people in the last fifty registrations. (Welcome, Mandi and Roxie!)

This forum would be completely unusable if I allowed automatic account

Hi- I'm new to dyeing and am looking for some tie-dye/low water immersion dyeing classes in the Los Angeles area. Also does anyone know of any dyeing groups (lots of quilters and knitters around). I've been doing alot of children's clothes- but would really like to improve my skills- I'd love to hear from anyone out there with like interests... Thanks, Robin

I guess I am a certified (or certifiable) tie dye nut. One of the last preparations I did to prepare for the imminent arrival of IKE was to wash a bunch of tie-dye clothing blanks, so I'll have something to tie if/when our power is out for an extended time.

We're a ways inland in Texas, so although we expect tropical storm force winds at our ranch and probable power outages, we're don't think we're in danger.

Still, good thoughts and/or prayers for all those in Ike's path are appreciated.

Sara
www.wildtyperanch.com

Just wonted to say hi. I have been doing LOTS of reading here and learning much. Thanks to everyone and especially to Paula for so freely sharing her wisdom!

I am a quilter and have been learning LWI dyeing this summer with some great and some not so great results! I learned a lot from the Fabridyeing 101 site. I used her recipes to dye my first rainbow and it turned out well. I sued a tie dye kit so I was a bit short on the dye amounts but it worked nonetheless. I ended up with more of a pastel rainbow than the deep colors I most like to work with but these will make a great baby quilt.

Sculptor Kim Graham writes,

I am a sculptor and I am presently building a large sculpture of a mermaid 10 feet tall. She has some really beautiful fins 16 feet wide to be made out of fabric. These fins are animated mechanically. I would like to find a dye artist to commission the coloring of these fins in the vibrant colors of a tiger fish. The fabric patterns will be made by a local seamstress. Several sets will be need to be made because these fins will age with light and movement. Are you at all interested in this commission or can you recommend another very experienced artist in the Seattle/ Portland area? I can send pictures of the designs.

There is a mail outage on pburch.net, so applications for new accounts will be delayed. No messages have been sent or received since 6:30 Sunday night, and I am still not getting my mail. Sorry about the inconvenience.

UPDATE: I am now receiving new mail, but none of the missing mail has appeared as it usually does after an outage.

-Paula

This is a silly thing to notice, but Sitemeter's odometer for this site just clicked over three million this morning:

As I write this, it's listing 3,000,008 visits and 9,562,819 page views for this site (the whole site, not just the forum) since May 1999.

(There was some sort of odd problem with the forum this morning, so that I could not post this then. I got an error saying that I did not have permission to post a new topic, which made no sense. The problem appears to have gone away though. )

-Paula

Hi,

My name is Sharon and I've been a dyer for a long time. For the last several years, I had no place to dye. This year spouse built me a studio in our garage complete with deep sink, washer and dryer and some recycled kitchen cupboards. I had a 50% coupon from JoAnn, so I bought 50 yards of white muslin, and got a shipment or two from Dharma and Pro-Chem, resurrected all my old tools and started to dye. Between August 1 and this week, I dyed those 50 yards plus about 25 or so of Kona and cotton sateen. (and some t-shirts). Now we're getting ready to head for California for the winter. Since we stay at an RV Park, I won't be able to dye. But the park has a big sewing room and a quilting machine. So, I've packed up fabric, paints, stamps, discharge paste, stencils - the whole shebang, and I'm going to embellish for 6 months.

Hello all. I am really happy to have come across this very informative forum, I can see it's going to take me a while to read through the posts but meanwhile I'd like to introduce myself.

My main interest in is felting and nuno felting, and have recently become interested in shibori dyeing techniques on felt and on silk blended felts and fabrics, and on discharge techniques. I have a lot of questions but some will probably have been answered before so I'll do my homework first and read through the posts!

Maureen Harding

The Dye Forum is back from its database problem!

Hi,
I'm new here.
I have a nice umbrella that has been left in the sun too long. As a result parts of it are bleached. I would like to somehow put a design on it that will mask the sun bleach marks, using a dye, paint, ???. Any suggestions are appreciated. The material is nylon.
Thanks,
John
P.S. It may have a protective, rain resistant, coating that I will first have to remove, but don't know how.

Looks like today the Site Meter number at the bottom of each page on this site is going to click over to two million. :-)