an Alabama Chanin project; “Magdalena Dusk”

The very lovely Lisa, of Lisa’s Carolina Handmade very kindly sent to me some really beautiful and special fabric; some 100% organic cotton jersey from the Alabama Chanin store in the United States.  How sweet is that?!!!  I’m so grateful to Lisa… and so excited about what I could do with this very precious stuff.  Obviously only an Alabama Chanin project would do.  SO I’ve been busy planning, plotting and generally scheming as to what could do the fabric justice.  
The colour is Dusk, which is a kind of blue-y/greeny/grey with a mostly blue-ish bent to it, if that makes any sense.  I had enough for a skirt and also to fully bind and appliqué a tank top.  I liked the idea of another allover, fully embellished Alabama Chanin project since I reeeeeeeeally love my first ensemble; so I bought some plain white cotton jersey from Spotlight, broke out the dyes and got cracking.  My aim was to make some colours to blend in nicely with the Dusk.  Since the dusk is a mostly blue with green/grey tinge, I was going for some mostly green with blue/grey tinge, and also some mostly grey with a blue/green tinge; meaning they will hopefully blend in really nicely with each other.  Several days of dyeing and some more dyeing and then some over-dyeing to fine-tune some of the colours; and I have a nice range of blue/green/grey shades to go nicely with my Dusk..

I used iDye for natural fabrics in a mix of colours; mostly Royal Blue, Golden Yellow and Brown.  I really liked the shades of grey I was getting with the iDye Brown to “dirty” the various teals, but the “grey” wasn’t quite grey enough, so over dyed those pieces further with just a touch of iDye in Black.  This turned out just close enough to perfect!  The colours are a little blotchy and swirly and I am very happy with that, since the Alabama Chanin jersey has a veeeery subtly motley tone to it too.  I really like the contrasts and variations in tones of the fabrics.

The next thing was to choose a stencil design.  I toyed with the idea of going with Anna’s Garden again, like with my first Alabama Chanin project and also the project I stencilled for Mum.  I really LOVE that design!  But of course I eventually decided I should go with something new.  I finally chose Magdalena from the Alabama Chanin website, available here.  I resized it slightly, traced it onto drafting film from Jacksons art supplies, cut out the stencil.  I’d nearly finished tracing before it dawned on me that the upper part of the design is actually identical to the lower part, just on a smaller scale! *light bulb*

At that point I had started to realise that smaller part of the design might be too small a scale for what I wanted to do, so I’ve pretty much decided to just use the lower, larger scale part for my project.  I haven’t ruled out using the entire design on a future project but for this one I’m just going for the one size motif, repeated all over.  

I bought some spray paint from Bunnings; White Knight “Squirts”, colour Flat Black, to stencil the design to the back of the upper fabric.  A few experimental “sprays” onto newspaper made me realise this was intense stuff!  So I cut a piece of silk organza, the type used for making silk screens and laid it over the stencil.