The Friday Interview: Erik and Amanda from Made By Hippies

Hooray! I have another interview!

One of the things I just love in this world is tie-dye. I love everything about it. I love the colours, I love the patterns, I love how you can either go full-out hippie with it or dress it up and do ironic juxtaposition with more formal clothes. I love it. The first thing I tie-dyed was a pair of Gap chinos, years ago. I just tied 2p coins into them, bunched them up, sat them in a sink full of purple dye and they came out great, but I really like the hippy multicoloured spirals and since I’ve discovered how to do them I’ve never looked back. I also love how it is still kind of the Underground Fibre Art and the links with all things alternative (I think they used to do it on The Farm).

I particularly love poking round etsy and admiring other people’s tie-dyeing, and I have had my eye (in a non-stalkerish, non-scary way) for a while on Made By Hippies, (also see their website, here), whose tie dyes I really love because they are so beautifully colour-saturated. So thank you very much, Erik and Amanda, for letting me interview you and put your lovely things on my blog!

1/ Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your business?
Made By Hippies is Erik and Amanda. We do it all from making everything we sell to writing all the html code for our websites in notepad.We first met in 2005 after being introduced by Erik’s sister Sarah who studied with Amanda in the Yucatan, Mexico during college. We started out making polymer clay beads together and then started experimenting with tie dyes. Amanda was the tie dye teacher at first but since making thousands of tie dyes we have both become master tie dyers working together to make our colorful creations.

Erik and Amanda

2/ How did you get into tie-dyeing, and how did you develop your craft?
Amanda first started tie dyeing in 2003 as part of her love of fiber arts. Erik started learning in 2006 inspired by recreating classic hippy designs and inventing some new ones. We started simple learning the basics of the colors and how to apply them and get a good result on the fabric. Many of the techniques we have come to use in tie dyes we have stumbled upon by accident but they all add up to the little difference that make every tie dye artists tie dye unique from each other. We try to have a lot of full color in our tie dyes with very little or no white left in the background. When we look back at all the tie dyes we have made we can see our patterns and colors have evolved over the years as we keep refining our skills and learning more about the craft of fabric dying and tie dye.

3/ It says on your website you make your tie-dyes using renewable energy. Do you try to incorporate eco principles into the things you sell?
We think handmade and being environmentally friendly go hand in hand which is why we are PGE Renewable Energy customers.

Another aspect of this is selling our tie dyes at the Gresham Farmers Market and other open air markets and festivals whenever we can. Participation in open air markets is how people originally traded with each other and really ties in what all handmade crafters do with the rest of the community by allowing them a place to engage with their local community. Everyone wins!

4/ What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever tie-dyed?
I guess the straight up answer would be this person who responded to a craigslist ad for tie dye I had posted back in the day and she wanted her coat that have been coffee stained tie dyed so we made it up for her.

But we have had a few oddball returns where the people get the tie dye then they freak out because it’s not what they thought they ordered and send it back to us so we refund them but we just wonder what they were thinking about when they ordered the tie dye from the photo?

Amanda tie-dyeing (and also wearing a nice one!)

5/ What’s your favourite thing that you’re making at the moment?
Our favorite tie dyes to make lately are our tie dye galaxies. Each tie dye galaxy is a totally unique creation in both pattern and color and the Universe itself is our inspiration for the designs.

Here are a few examples from our etsy shop:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/60378672/

http://www.etsy.com/transaction/33070388

http://www.etsy.com/transaction/33324326

http://www.etsy.com/transaction/33035385

http://www.etsy.com/transaction/32602887

http://www.etsy.com/transaction/32708305

Tie-dye galaxy. Fabulous!

6/ Do you have a typical customer, and if so what are they like?
Really the cool thing about selling tie dyes is finding out that really everyone secretly wants to wear tie dye, even if they won’t admit it to themselves. [Note from me, this is completely true ;-) ]. We have sold tie dyes to babies that aren’t even born yet to 90 year old ladies who have been wearing tie dye for years and everyone in between. But if we had to narrow down one customer type at the market it’s the mother and daughter teams who buy the most tie dyes and then online probably just hippies who want a new tie dye that is Made By Hippies.

7/ Are there any other tie-dye artists you particularly admire?
Yeah there are definitely a lot of cool tie dyers out there making tie dyes. Sometimes at festivals we will see someone wearing a really cool intricately designed tie dye and we will study it and try to imagine how it was folded up and how it was dyed and then later when we get back to the tie dye studio try to recreate it. There are lots of great tie dye artists on etsy too. Although there are some poorly made tie dyes out there (more the mass produced stuff) that I definitely do not enjoy I admire everyone who makes their own handmade tie dyes.

One last thing I want to say, please check out our free tie dye instructions at http://www.howtotiedye.net and then our websites at http://www.madebyhippies.com and http://www.etsy.com/shop/madebyhippies and http://www.youtube.com/user/madebyhippies and http://www.twitter.com/madebyhippies

Peace!

Erik and Amanda

******************

Thank you Erik and Amanda, really enjoyed your interview and I love your tie dyes (also, do look at their really helpful tie-dye instructions – I had never thought of putting the fabric on a draining rack or letting it dry first, and I think it would really help so I am going to try with my next batch. I see much tie-dyeing in my future. Indeed mum wants a tshirt 'that will co-ordinate with beige'. It's a bit of a challenge but I'm going to have a go).

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

The Anti-Beige League

I had just sat down to begin this WIP Wednesday post (thanks Tami for hosting and organising!) when Partner walked past the study door. ‘I’ve just seen the woman from a couple of doors down walking past our house’ he said, thoughtfully. (Because we are a terrace, we have a path through our back garden that the neighbours walk through, and it is sunny and also bin day tomorrow so everyone is roaming about). ‘I’d only gone into the kitchen to get a magazine. She looked a bit surprised to see me’. I looked round the door and Partner is completely naked and on his way to the bath, so if you see a headline in the Daily Mail about Cambridge Academic Arrested for Public Nudity, Neighbour Receiving Counselling you will know who it is and you can imagine me shaking my head in despair and eating biscuits frantically. Anyway let’s get on with the things I wanted to show you. What do we want pictures of when the sun shines, we want pictures of colourful things, which is excellent as here I am tie-dyeing and quilting and managing to free-motion machine quilt without a/ a darning foot, b/ any natural ability, or c/ anything you ought to have ideally, so, go me.

Why yes that is Jilly Cooper you can see on that bookcase. I am an Intellectual

This is my mum’s quilt, do you remember we had the border conversation? Thank you for everyone’s brilliant suggestions. I went with navy, and to my delight they had some navy reduced at Cottonpatch so that confirmed me in my choice (I think I will do the binding a different colour, though). I’m thinking it works, what do you think? Since I mentioned my mother’s liking for beige, I am slightly concerned to report that she has gone into Mad Beige Overdrive and is buying up beige things right, left and centre. I cannot see how she can possibly like this quilt, I cannot see it. Anyway, someone will have it, so I am cutting out squares for the back at the moment. The back has a special theme. It is, ‘random fabrics that are big enough for Susie to cut 10 1/2 inch squares out of’, so you can see that with a coherent and well-thought-out theme like that it is going to look fabulous.

I bet you all iron your duvet covers. I feel inadequate. Ours has got all its buttons missing as well

This is my previous quilt, you may remember it. I am showing it to you in situ to prove how much I use it. When I made it and finished it, I thought, what am I actually going to do with this thing now, but actually I use it all the time. It is on the bed at the moment (I fold it over so it is only on my side as Partner’s core temperature is about 50 degrees higher than mine) but, I sometimes sit in the evenings and think, what I need now is a quilt to put over my legs. Which brings me to:

I can do patterns that are not spirals, yes I can. I can do stripes

This is hot off the press and I haven’t ironed it yet, but it is the centre panel for the next quilt I am going to make. I haven’t decided yet if it’s going to be a lap quilt or a wallhanging, but I’m thinking some kind of double pieced strip border and possibly incorporating non-cotton (but washable) fabrics. I haven’t quite decided yet. And today I have also been making this cushion.

Grey and pink = ironic juxtaposition. I am a one-trick pony

It’s made from ties and old scarves and actually, do you know, I really like it. I’m going to make a couple. I experimented with free-motion squiggly quilting on one of the panels:

The skill is in not losing your nerve, that is all, it is like Life

And it was really easy. For readers who quilt, all I did was, I lowered the feed dogs on my machine and I took the foot off completely (you are supposed to use a darning foot but it worked fine for me with no foot at all). Then you just move the fabric around (this makes sense when you are doing it), and try to keep your lines as curvy as possible and not cross them. I’m not sure I could do a bed-size quilt like this, but perhaps I could – it does seem to bunch less, and I like the effect. I have realised, reading round other quilting blogs, that people do actually send their quilts away to be quilted and do not struggle through the horror themselves. I think this makes absolute sense, because actually it’s not that easy and I’m sure a professional with a long-arm machine is the way to go, but I think I will persevere through at least a few more myself because I like the catharsis when I have finished. I feel like Mrs Doyle when Father Ted bought her the teamaker: maybe I like the misery. Hey, at least it’s only quilting I have an unhealthy and slightly masochistic emotional relationship with, and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a self-help book called Women Who Quilt Too Much. So it must be absolutely fine.

For other WIP Wednesday posts, go and have a look at Tami's blog and as ever, be impressed by the creativity out there in blogland!

A White Album

Inspired by The Crafty Cripple, who has been taking part in the weekly photo challenge on Shutterboo and keeps posting some very alluring photographs, I thought I would jump in myself and have a go (the flickr group is here). Well, this week’s challenge was ‘white’ which was interesting because I have been having a tie-dyeing session, so not much white there! I was hoping the big fat white cat from 2 doors down might come and sit and look at me and then I could take his photograph (since we had the new fence done, he comes every day and sits looking at it, with a furious expression. I know you are thinking, how can you tell, but I can. I can only assume it smells wrong or something, or it is on his patch and we ought to have asked his permission). Anyway, no big fat white cat, he must be busy staring furiously as something else this week, but it did strike me that All The Things before you actually tie-dye them have this strange white vulnerability: pure, glowing white but you know it won’t last, because as soon as you open the procion dye pot, boom, there it is, all over. So I experimented with a photo of my tie-dyeing equipment beforehand.

Actually, look. Don't use thin white bin bags for tie-dyeing. COVER EVERYTHING WITH THE THICKEST ONES YOU CAN FIND!

But it wasn’t quite right. Then I got distracted by some white bubbles on a dish I’d just washed up.

Finest Ecover bubbles because I save the environment while I am washing up. Smug, moi?

But the one I liked most was the one of the soda ash being dissolved preparatory to soaking all the cloth.

Fixative! Very important! Do you want your tie-dyeing to run in the wash and turn your pants all murky?

It was a fun challenge because there are a surprising amount of different shades and variations in white, and keeping the colour simple means you can focus on the texture. Next week is 'large' - this holds no fear for a woman with a small plastic gorilla, ha!

You know what I really like is colour, though ;-). So this is what I ended up with after I had done my tie-dyeing (well, there was more than this. I just didn’t want to haul it all up onto the fence. The neighbours think I’m odd enough as it is).

Sunshine! Get the camera out! Rush out and hang that tie-dye on the fence!

I was intending it as the centre panel for a quilted wallhanging but I’m not sure. I like it but it turns out that the idea I had in my head was smaller and more colour-intensive (who knew? Not me until I’d actually done the dyeing!) so I’m going to dye another batch next week.

I am on my fourth block and I am losing the will to live

And this is a bit of a taster of a new quilt top I’m piecing. 900 2” squares. Did you all wince in unison? Good ;-).