After trying a pastel blue sky on my piece inspired by fall trees, I tried it with dark blue instead. I actually liked it pretty well, but I didn’t have enough bright blue to do it justice. So, I tried white. And also auditioned the idea of more twigs. The verdict: YES to the white…
What do you get when you add a beautiful setting, great friends, and time to make quilts? Well, fun productivity, of course! At a recent SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) retreat I took my portable design wall, my easel, and ALL of my hand dyed fabrics. I didn’t have an idea when I left home,…
“Deconstructed Screen Printing.” That’s a mouth full isn’t it? Perhaps the alternate term is a little more self-explanatory: “Breakdown Printing.” This technique uses thickened dyes applied with screen printing and it often yields extraordinary results. Like this (detail shot.) Don’t you love the squiggly irregular shapes and “halos?” You probably know about screen printing…
Well, after LOTS of trial and error, trouble shooting, and rearranging, I finally finished my latest abstract piece, When Fuchsia Came to Play. A detail shot of the fabrics – most of them dyed by me. I showed you my plans for rearranging in an earlier post. As part of that, I whacked 7+” off the…
After success creating Segue into Summer, I decided to use it as a loose template for some additional quilts made with hand dyed fabrics. I’m calling this my “Intersection” series. I plan to use tilted straight lines as the “skeleton” for each one. First, I pulled out the large scaled hand dyes I wanted to use,…
If you’ve been following my blog you know I’ve been learning about printing fabric with thickened dye. And, of course, I was anxious to use them! Plus, I also wanted to try larger scaled abstract pieces, as well as the idea of using a little bit of “ugly” color. All those goals came together in…
When dying fabric there are two types I want to produce: yardage, and specialty. Yardage has a mostly all over pattern and can easily be cut up and used. Specialty looks almost like a whole cloth design, with thought given to composition and such. These yellow pieces fall firmly into the yardage camp. The top…
While dying fabric I’m learning a lot! Some of it comes from books and some of it I stumble upon. Case in point, trying to mix thickened dye colors directly on the fabric. I had heard that they wouldn’t really mix in this way, but I was feeling lazy and had to give it a…
Ellen Anne Eddy says, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” In other words, don’t expect yourself to master something right away. If it’s worth doing it’s worth your practice time and whatever mediocre results you get along the way. Well, I think maybe I was the poster child for this philosophy in my…
Have you tried ice dyeing? Oh my! It produces BEAUTIFUL brilliant colors and complex patterns. At a recent group dyeing day, Dij taught us how to do it. First, she showed us various ways to bunch, scrunch, and secure the fabric. Like tie dye, the folds in the fabric affect the way the dye penetrates…