Why my house will never be clean...

The past two weekends (Columbus Day and October 19-20) were spent on the road--traveling to NY over Columbus Day, then to Pittsburgh for a wedding on October 19th.  So I had very little time to do anything fabric/fiber related lately, especially since I don't get home from work til 5:30 every night and have a hard time getting motivated in the evenings.

I tried to make up for it this past weekend, first getting up early Saturday (as always) and soaking some fabric in soda ash solution to get ready for ice dyeing.  I first saw this method on this blog  and thought I'd give it a try.  Instead of using the dye powder, she made a strong dye/water solution.  (I have lots of jars of dye solutions already made up, since I don't always use 100% of what I mix, so it was a good reason to use it up!)  Thanks, Dolly!

Here are some of my results--which I think turned out beautifully! Colors used were Fuschia, Straw, Tangerine, and Sky Blue.

The one surprise to me is that the blue pretty much disappeared, turning into lots of purple, but not much green.

It was so cold over the weekend (for here) that the ice didn't even melt all the way after 24 hours.

I liked these so much that I started another bunch of ice dyes on Sunday morning using mostly blues & purples (Blue violet, Sapphire blue and Grape)

And then I did some screen printing on some fabric that I had dyed and painted previously, using some thickened dye solution.  This hasn't been washed out yet, I think I have to let it set for about 24 hours before washing.

And I tried stamping with a hand carved stamp I had made a while ago -- but my Setacolor paint was more like a gel (think it's getting too old) so it didn't turn out exactly like I had planned...

No time for house cleaning!  Oh, and the wedding I attended in Pittsburgh last weekend was for my niece, Karin, who lives in Florida.  I gave them a quilt for a wedding picture, and she was nice enough to send me a picture of it in their house--but I can't get the picture to show up here correctly.

And here's my former wild cat, Ferrell.  He has been hanging around since last spring, and he even lets me pet him once in a while now.  He has a warm bed to sleep in, lots of food & water, and has pretty much made himself at home.

 This is one reason why a cat is a valuable thing to have around--a baby snake.

This is Ferrell taking care of that snake--he played with it for a while then killed it.  I've seen quite a few snakes around my yard that are 6' long or more, which is kind of creepy but they do have their place in the ecosystem, I guess.

And a picture of my beautiful lab, Leo, who has been with me for about 1.5 years now and is a wonderful dog.  Thanks again to Lab Rescue of NC.