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…
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 +…
You’ve heard of trunk shows, right? When a group of quilts travels in order to be shown at various quilt guilds, shows, meetings, etc.? Here in Florida, my SAQA co-rep, Karol Kusmaul, had the brilliant idea of doing something like this on a statewide level. We’re calling it a “Roaming Gallery.” (Her idea, which I…
I still can’t believe I made a blanket, but here it is. It’s about 53″ x 42″ and will serve as a nice lap quilt for my son. Although blankets don’t normally get names, I decided this one needed one. So, I’m calling it Indigo Hug. Appropriate, don’t you think? Of course, I love the indigo, but…
Being blessed with a bunch of indigo fabrics, I was ready to make an art piece with them. I knew I’d like to add an accent color, but which one? After some auditioning, I decided on the pink/orange family. But, how to best use these wonderful designs? I didn’t really want to cut into them,…
In Part One I showed you how to mark large irregular circle shapes. Now, let’s learn how to make smaller flowers. I did this sample on a t-shirt and I wanted the design to be on the front only. Therefore, I put a baking sheet inside the shirt. Draw 5 small dots with a Sharpie….
While at the retreat, I attended a demo about dying fabric with Sharpies (permanent markers) and rubbing alcohol (isopropyl.) I already knew alcohol would make Sharpies bleed, but I’d never seen this particular application. This is the sort of result you can expect. Cool, right? And this is how you do it: – Stretch fabric…
In addition to the gorgeous indigo, my fabrics dyed with Procion mx dyes also turned out well. I didn’t have time to thoroughly wash them at first, so I draped them around my back porch for drying. So pretty! Believe it or not, these fabrics were made by simply wadding and scrunching up a piece…
Wow! Wait till you see these fabulous results from our dying day. We began to get an idea of what lay ahead as Gabriele unfolded her pieces and hung them up. Aren’t these awesome? Gabriele used colored fabric for some of her dying, like the yellow and blue one below. And check this one out!…