Fear of Feathers--Pteronophobia

For a long time, I've resisted making feathers, because I thought they looked too hard. Yesterday I finally bit the bullet and sat down and sewed some.

I followed the tutorial of Diane Gaudynski, guest host this month on SewCalGal's Free Motion quilt along. After sketching the feathers with a chalk pencil, I started sewing.

The feathers really pop when filling is added around them. Here I just used a loop-y stitch as a filler.

I really like how they turned out--not perfect (I have a long way to go) but pretty nice for my first try.

It was easier for me to sew on the left side instead of the right side of the stem, which is something I can work on in the future.

Here's the finished piece. I think I might make a pillow out of it.

And, I've been working on the (seemingly endless) Candiotic Table. I fused all 66 pieces of the Natural Triad to a piece of charcoal fabric.

Next, I have to remove all the temporary labels and fuse the ones I printed onto a piece of fabric.

And I've been dyeing the 2nd group of colors, the Brights Triad. They're batching now...

A February to dye for

In early February, I started an on-line class called Dyeing 101: Controlling Color. There's been a massive amount of dyeing done already, and I'm only halfway through the assignment. Candy Glendening is the teacher, and she's great. The course is full of embedded videos and lots of helpful worksheets and information--Candy is a chemistry teacher and it really shows!

Here are my sample swatches from the Natural Triad:

And a bigger shot:

And it just keeps going--66 swatches in all. All colors are different proportions of just three dyes (one yellow, one blue, and one red).

Next up, I'm working on the Brights Triad, again only using 3 dyes. That's my weekend project, I can hardly wait for Saturday a.m.

Raindrops quilt -- still in progress

This quilt is a LOT of work--but I've been plugging away at it. Here are a bunch of pieces taped up to my front door and wall, as my design wall wasn't big enough for it. I started sewing the blocks together last night after work, but only got 3 finished.
It's going to be pretty large when done--and I'm determined that it will be completed, that it won't be a UFO.

On-line class

I signed up for an on-line precision dyeing class last month. This is our first assignment, dyeing tints of three single colors (gradation). The colors I used were Golden Yellow, Sky Blue, and Fuchsia--6 fat quarters of each.

Candy Glendening is the teacher, at Candied Fabrics. She provides great written instructions, and lots of videos embedded in each lesson. I think it's going to help me a lot, as I've had trouble in the past coming up with a specific color that I needed to dye.

Several of the colors are perfect for a Judy Niemeyer quilt I've been working on. I'm auditioning them now, and hope to cut and sew some centers today!

So far, I think I've sewed around 23 of the larger spiked sections, and need to sew 30 total. Kind of tedious, but sometimes I need to do some mindless sewing.