What do Michelle Obama’s purses, large chickens, and drought all have in common? They’ve all inspired African batik fabrics. Originally designed in the Dutch East Indies, these fabrics are now designed and printed commercially in Holland and sold – to a very enthusiastic market – along the coast of Africa. You can learn all about…
One thing I’ve learned while blogging about my dyeing adventures is how to correctly spell the word. 🙂 Thanks to all you readers who pointed out the need for a letter E in the word dyeing. I think I’ve got it now. And I hope you’ll excuse my misspelled pun in the title. 34 fabrics,…
I’ve created quite a few butt-ugly fabrics during my dying experiments. (No offense to butts!) However, I know that I can save most of them, so they’re only “problems,” until I can get around to rescuing them. In the meantime, they’re teaching me what NOT to do. Like screen printing with liquid dye instead of…
Well, once I got going with the dying I really got busy. These are my results at the end of week 1. It all took longer than I imagined because of doing multiple things to the same piece of fabric. Initially, I was washing the fabric after each step, resoaking it with soda ash, and…
Imagine my surprise when a friend told me that she had voted for me “in the quilt blog contest.” What? I had never heard of such a thing. But, lo and behold, she showed me this. Apparently my blog is a finalist in the “Best Art Quilt Blog” category. Well, that’s certainly nice! (Even though…
I spent all of last week learning about dye painting and other dying techniques. Once I used fabric that was properly treated, my color wheel turned out as I expected. One of the things I was anxious to try was drawing a black line with a syringe. Here, I’ve done it on berry colored (fuchsia +…
After painting fabric and seeing how much it stiffened the fabric, I knew I wanted to learn about painting with dyes instead. In anticipation I got a good tutorial book and asked for dyes for my just-around-the-corner birthday. Living in Florida, I KNEW I wanted to dye inside, something that very few people do. I…
You readers are really great! When I posted my quilt at this stage several of you had good suggestions about how I might improve it. The most common suggestion was to add some orange back in. Something I had considered but rejected. Another tip was to break up the white and to extend the “splashing”…
I got this far on my current quilt, before I knew it needed something more. Clearly, the white needed some texture. So, I decided to fling some paint onto it! I practiced first on a piece of muslin, then I just went for it. Amazingly, I did this without any fear! I was READY to break…
Well, after painting those (challenging) fabrics I had to figure out what to do with them. Since I wasn’t crazy about some of them, I knew I’d need to cut isolated portions and motifs for use. I had NO IDEA what my composition might look like, but I started cutting out sections and MINDLESSLY sticking…