This is what goes on when your back is turned.This is Voodoo making himself comfy on the kitchen table on a piece of fabric that has been prepared with soy wax.
Black hair will be an interesting element.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
helpers
This is what goes on when your back is turned.This is Voodoo making himself comfy on the kitchen table on a piece of fabric that has been prepared with soy wax.
Black hair will be an interesting element.
palette brewed, holding for weather
FOF08 - day 2 (finally)
A good time to cleanup, break, think about lunch (hey! I've been up since 6am) and wait for the fog to break and the temperature to head from the present 51 to the promised 70 and sunny.
These are dye concentrates and I rarely take one color straight out of the bottle without spicing it with one or two others. All unique, all the time.
Like that Custom Blood? A new mix that includes the dreaded Fuchsia 308. We'll see how the fabric likes it.
Smiling faces
So what if I didn't get to go to fiber camp?
Better,I got to meet Colin's lady Raquel who is a delightful young woman. They left here midday yesterday to get her home to Gainsville, FL in time for a singing engagement but she has happy plans to relocate here to the ATL.
I think they will be making great music together.
First Fruits
What's this, you say? Some kind of bread dough complete with mold?
Nope. It's a yard of vintage cotton damask hatching out a sprinkling of rock salt (which actually had rocks in it!) coated with a variety of dye powder colors.
Yesterday during a particularly slow Braves game I just couldn't stand looking at all that fabric waiting for color. I left it stewing in the soda ash solution since Tuesday as it has been just too cold and wet outside for dyeing. Wet is OK but cold is a no-no.
Here it is after wash, dry and iron. I also gave the rusted pieces a thorough cleaning. I made two of each of these pieces with the intent of doing some further surface design stuff to them. Some soy wax, some overdye - who knows.
Today is going to be the first sunny day in a week! Today the colors get mixed and the real fun begins.
Friday, April 04, 2008
harken back to days of yore
The recent acquisition of a ton of beautiful cotton prints has me thinking about the genuine blankets that I have made in the past. As with most quilters, my very first quilt was for my first child. Colin will be 28 in a few months. This blankie was used daily as much for dragging around as sleeping under and so was machine washed and dried almost every other day (for about three years) out of necessity. To this day, I'm impressed at how well it held up.
Nine months is a long time to fiddle with one project. The only exposure to quilts I had then was casually examining a few dusty relics in antique stores. Even then they were undervalued. I think I took a book off the shelf in the library and put it back. No one in my family quilted. I was on my own with my own ideas about how a quilt was built. I saw it as a building process even then.
The fabrics were all special except for the pink backing. I just can't remember where I got it but I know I chose pink to hedge our bets - this was before you could easily know the sex of your child before it was born. The rest of the fabrics were all family treasures in my eyes.Even then I was a fiber hoarder. The pale blue came from one of my favorite dresses back in sixth grade. The light brown print was a shirt that my husband wore when he was very young. The orange, green and yellow print came from a Mumu that my Aunt Jo brought me from Hawaii and the dark batik was a hand-me down maternity blouse given me my own of my longtime friends, Hilary. I can still picture her wearing it. She's a grandma now.
I cut each two inch square by hand using a cardboard template and a pair of paper scissors. Once I had piles of squares, I decided that the design possibilities would be improved if I cut each square diagonally.
Then came weeks of puzzle shuffling and then the hand stitching began in earnest. It's all hand pieced and was originally tied with cotton floss in the middle of each unit but in early use the knots weren't holding up so I went back and hand quilted inside each and every triangle. What else should one do while watching your baby grow?
Nine months is a long time to fiddle with one project. The only exposure to quilts I had then was casually examining a few dusty relics in antique stores. Even then they were undervalued. I think I took a book off the shelf in the library and put it back. No one in my family quilted. I was on my own with my own ideas about how a quilt was built. I saw it as a building process even then.
The fabrics were all special except for the pink backing. I just can't remember where I got it but I know I chose pink to hedge our bets - this was before you could easily know the sex of your child before it was born. The rest of the fabrics were all family treasures in my eyes.Even then I was a fiber hoarder. The pale blue came from one of my favorite dresses back in sixth grade. The light brown print was a shirt that my husband wore when he was very young. The orange, green and yellow print came from a Mumu that my Aunt Jo brought me from Hawaii and the dark batik was a hand-me down maternity blouse given me my own of my longtime friends, Hilary. I can still picture her wearing it. She's a grandma now.
I cut each two inch square by hand using a cardboard template and a pair of paper scissors. Once I had piles of squares, I decided that the design possibilities would be improved if I cut each square diagonally.
Then came weeks of puzzle shuffling and then the hand stitching began in earnest. It's all hand pieced and was originally tied with cotton floss in the middle of each unit but in early use the knots weren't holding up so I went back and hand quilted inside each and every triangle. What else should one do while watching your baby grow?
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