Are you a Star Trek fan? Do you know about Klingons? They’re a very fierce fighting clan who’s motto is “It is a good day to die.” So, when I headed out the door to a recent dye session my husband pronounced it as “a good day to dye.” And indeed, it was. The weather…
I’m getting ready for a shibori dying day with my art quilt buddies. (Shibori is a type of dying which uses manipulation of the fabric to resist the dye in certain areas. Tie dye is an example.) There are a TON of ways to fold, roll, scrunch, and stitch fabric prior to dying to get…
Now, THIS is exciting stuff! After doing deconstructed screen printing with randomly created screens, I decided to draw on my last screen, with a syringe. This is a technique I learned in a DSP class with Kerr Grabowski. That’s my screen above. I drew on it with very thick black dye. In fact, it was…
I recently got to play with deconstructed screen printing again, and I got some pretty cool results. The process is easy, but it also involves a fair amount of dyes, equipment, and set up. Here’s a brief video overview. You start by purposely allowing thickened dye to dry in your screen. A random design is…
Have you ever been to a class and realized you left the most appropriate fabrics at home? This happened to me when I took a class from Elizabeth Barton. I learned a lot about abstracting and designing and had a great paper “sketch” I wanted to interpret in fabric. Per Elizabeth’s instructions, I worked up…
My latest abstract piece is progressing nicely. After creating the sketch and selecting fabrics, I began to compose the background on my design wall. Here it is, completed. Next, I made tracing paper patterns of the two undulating lines I wanted to add. It’s coming along, don’t you think? I was happy with this design…
Maybe I need more fabric. My husband would LAUGH at the idea! With about 1000 pieces of fabric SURELY I must have anything I could imagine, right? Well, maybe not. I’m used to working with lots of small pieces (think palm-sized to hand-sized,) but my next quilt would probably need much larger pieces. I needed…
My friend, Ruth Anne, once invited a group of us to her “barn” for a messy project. This time it was dyeing. Our first project was to dye 8 different gradations of black. All with the same dye, just in different saturations/strengths. Since black dye is made up from other colors, it will sometimes separate…
I’m very comfortable using commercial and hand-dyed fabrics in my creations, but I have a few quirky fabrics that I have to treat differently. Things that ravel, ones that melt, and thin silks. I recently pulled out a few of these to think about how I might use them. The yellow-green fabrics are the result…
My sister and I had a great time attending a recent scarf dying class. Taught by my good friend, Jo-Ann Jensen, she provided me with plain silk, knowing that I’d want to use it in quilts. Of course! She first taught us how to do a tie-dye sort of thing. She calls her geodes. Well,…