Dark & Stormy Night

There were seven separate tornado warnings in Davidson County (NC) where I live. Kind of a dark & stormy night, how appropriate that I was working on quilting this when I heard the first one come over the TV:

It was a pretty productive weekend otherwise, I got some of my already-dyed fabric batiked like this:

This fabric was first dyed in Warm Yellow (Procion) and I really like the color. These have then been soaked in bleach/water, then in vinegar/water (discharge), and are ready to be redyed. I'm thinking fuschia will be the next color for them.

Dyeing & Batik Fabric photos

Well, here are two pictures of the green fabrics I dyed over the weekend. These pieces were all dyed with Avacado coloring (Dharma procion) and see how different they all look. The piece at the bottom was one that I also batiked, and I put this one in the dye bath first--it's very dark in comparison. Each of the others was put into the dye bath at about 5-10 minute intervals, because I wanted to see how the color saturation varied.

I realize that the lighting isn't wonderful--I took these pictures around 6:30 last night in my garage, after work, and a bank of clouds moved in yesterday and the sky was pretty overcast.

These are the two batik designs I did, the large circles were done using a turnip cut in half, and the other was done with a "tjanting" tool that I ordered from Dharma along with the dye powders. As you can see, I definitely need to work on my technique, but I had fun, so that's what counts!

A productive weekend

Spring has finally arrived here in North Carolina. That means it's finally time for some fabric dyeing!

Here are my dyeing supplies, all ready to go in my garage.

My dyeing table consists of an outdoor patio table (plastic), with a piece of plywood on top.

These fabrics are being dyed with some procion mx dyes -- I think the colors are soft black and plum.

Definitely plum here:

And here is my "formula" & instruction book, Coloring Your Cloth.

No finished pieces to show you, though, because the batteries in my camera died. I also tried some batik pieces, they're home drying on my clothes rack in the garage because it rained late yesterday and had to get them off my clothesline in a hurry.

I learned that I need to buy larger quantities of white fabric (maybe a bolt) so that I have enough on hand when I feel the urge to dye. I also learned that you can get several different shades of the same color by adding one piece of fabric right away, then adding another about 10 minutes later, and yet another after waiting about 10 more minutes.

The old barn is done!

The Old Red Barn wall hanging is done, and will be on it's way to Pulaski, NY this week (as soon as I can get to the post office). I think my favorite part is the quilted sky.

I started a new quilt, too. I cut out the half-circles using a circle cutting ruler, then inset them and sewed them together. It went together really fast, and I've already started quilting it. I really like circles, and don't understand why people think sewing curved seams is hard.

Cellular & circular stitching

I found this great picture of some plant cellular structure on the web

So I thought I'd try and stich one up myself.

This is what I ended up with after about an hour of work. The circle is only about 18" around.

And here is a rusted, painted, and quilted thing that started out as a rusting technique presented in a class at the Sawtooth Center last month. I quilted it Sunday night, and might add some beads. Both make me think of spring, maybe the recent warm-up here is influencing me.

The old red barn wall hanging

I worked almost all weekend on this wall hanging, in between grocery shopping, doing some laundry, and cooking some meals. The first pictures are before I started quilting it, I drew the quilt outlines on with a chalk marker.

Here are close-ups of the quilting, I was trying to get it to show up better by taking the pictures on an angle, but it was pretty early this morning (before 7:00 a.m.) and the lack of outside light didn't help.