Anita Heady Fiber Arts

The Stock Multiplies

2012-01-08T17:53:00.004-05:00

With a lot of help from my friend Marybeth, we added a lot of fabric to the shelves this week. Mostly we've been freshening up the stash and re-pricing, although there are a few new pieces on the shelves now. Here's the progress so far:

January 5

January 8

Pretty good for 3 days work. Thanks Marybeth!

Countdown to Port St. Lucie Show

2012-01-05T07:50:00.001-05:00

We're in the countdown to the Port St. Lucie, FL Quilt Show, so we've been preparing fabric...

Bill has pressed these and they're ready to be cut and priced.

Here's our starting point; this is about 600 yards of fabric that was dyed previously. Let's see how much we can add to this inventory by showtime.

Here's the heart of the operation, Bill--our super pressing machine.

Lately...

2011-12-31T15:57:00.002-05:00

Let's see...lately I've been doing a lot of this...

Yep, making pretty things.

Happy New Year!

Merry Merry

2011-12-24T07:46:00.002-05:00

Whichever holiday you celebrate this month, have a peaceful and joyous holiday season!

Preparing for 2012

2011-12-21T08:41:00.005-05:00

I've started dyeing fabric for 2012 after a nice long break.

It feels good to be busy and have color all over the house when the weather is gray and cool.

Bill on His Own

2011-12-20T07:54:00.000-05:00

My DH Bill had his own sales booth at Hendershots: Coffee, Bar, Misic & Art on Sunday...

His worked looked great and he had some sales!

Creative Characters

2011-12-19T07:25:00.001-05:00

Last weekend our group of ladies gathered at Tracy's house to play with surface design methods. I carved some simple stamps and most of the ladies printed on linens with their stamps...

This is Mary Ann's hand dyed fabric with print applied. Isn't it beautiful?

Some of these are Tracy's pieces

These are my prints, including a chop (signature stamp) I made previously

Fun!

Holiday Market

2011-12-03T07:17:00.001-05:00

I just love holiday music, decorations, festivities and markets--the whole package. This year with our Pandora subscription we can listen to all kinds of holiday music online, so the house has been filled with tunes. My favorite? Sleigh Ride performed by a symphony orchestra. Live is even better.

Here are some photos of our booth at the OCAF Holiday Market this weekend. We're sharing a booth with Catherine Hart; many of the pieces on the back wall are hers...

Bill's rust dyes are framed...

Our wool ornaments are a hit...

This is an original print block that I purchased from Patty Coulter of the Bird's Nest Press. Love it.

This Weekend's Holiday Market

2011-11-28T11:01:00.001-05:00

This weekend Anita Heady Fiber Arts will share a booth with Catherine Hart at the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation Holiday Market in Watkinsville, GA. The Market will host 65 vendor booths plus 35 artists in the OCAF Art Shoppe. Come on over for a visit!

Catherine is an award winning Athens-area fiber artist with lovely pieces that hang in many Georgia art shows and some local businesses.

Here are some of my small gifts for the Market...

Wild & Wooly Ornaments

Handmade and quilted potholders

Rust and color dyed art (by Bill)

Happy Kids Quilts

For more information, click on the OCAF link above. We hope to see you there!

Holiday Downtown

2011-11-24T17:16:00.001-05:00

One of the reasons we chose to move to Athens four years ago was the vibrant downtown. This week we had a nice dinner out and walked downtown for a while, admiring the holiday decorations...

Bill waiting for his dinner

Broad St. across from the University of Georgia

The other end of Broad St.

The newly re-opened, and beautifully restored, Georgia Theater

Heery's Too! (above), Helix and Native America have my favorite window displays. The streets will be bustling with holidays shoppers tomorrow. This weekend, UGA and Georgia Tech. will play their yearly football game and next weekend UGA will play in the SEC Championship game! I love this town.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T08:59:00.001-05:00

All the best to you and yours on this Thanksgiving Day!

New Product

2011-11-22T10:07:00.001-05:00

For a few weeks I have been working on a new product line for AHFA, hand-dyed, silk & natural-fiber blend scarves. Here are a few that will be available at Helix in downtown Athens, GA.

...and look at these scraps. They'll be great as ribbons, hair ties and perhaps as strands for knitting!

Supreme Slip

2011-11-16T20:30:00.001-05:00

I was happily sewing along, quilting a sweet toddler quilt when my machine started to act funny. I stopped for a few seconds to see if I could find a problem. No problem, so I sewed another few inches.

Humm. What a pain. We were moving along so nicely...

...until I machine quilted my Supreme Slider to the back of my quilt. Good grief.

Am I the only quilter who has ever done this?

2011-11-14T12:46:00.001-05:00

Here are a few items that I'm preparing to sell at the OCAF (Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation) Holiday Market in Watkinsville, GA the first weekend of December.

I'll have some small quilts for children...

These are potholders in various stages of being finished...

Come on over for a weekend of fun and holiday shopping.

Student Work

2011-11-04T08:05:00.000-04:00

On Saturday I taught an Advanced Dye class to a group of lovely ladies. We played with thickened dye, soda soaked fabric (wet and dry), stamps and screens and all sorts of other tools to print on fabric. Here are some of their pieces (I missed photographing some of the best ones, I'm afraid)...

Miriam was creating fur colors for a new piece.

A good, messy time was had by all!

1 Week, 2 Ribbons!

2011-10-22T21:13:00.002-04:00

This weekend the Georgia Quilt Show was held in Duluth, GA (metro Atlanta) and once again Marybeth Tawfik and I had an entry. Last weekend we won a 2nd place ribbon for "Chromatic" (see the last entry).

This week we won a biggie--Holis Turnbow gave our quilt, "Blue Moon", his Judge's Choice ribbon!

Here she is...

Misty Mountain QuiltFest

2011-10-17T07:20:00.006-04:00

This weekend we were vendors at the Misty Mountain QuiltFest in the Georgia mountains. The trees were in full Fall color and it was a lovely weekend for the show. Here are some highlights...

Our 2nd Place quilt (Anita Heady maker and Marybeth Tawfik long arm machine quilter)

Our friend, Mary Ann Mauney, won the Judge's Choice ribbon! This piece had it's own wall in honor of the award.

And what do we have here? Fabric beads on this art quilt by Carleen Brock.

Lovely!

Fabric Beads on a Quilt

2011-10-11T08:17:00.004-04:00

For those of you who have taken my little fabric bead-making demo, here's a photo from the 2011 Asheville (NC) Quilt Show of fabric beads on a quilt. Terry Williams is the maker, and the quilt is lovely...

East Cobb Quilt Show

2011-09-19T11:20:00.005-04:00

We had a wonderful time manning our vendor booth at the East Cobb Quilt Show this weekend in Marietta, GA (metro Atlanta). Here are some photos:

This is the show floor with the vendors on the second floor overlooking the quilts. Perfect setup!

This is Bill being a very good booth Assistant Manager...

Our booth...

The rust dyed wall quilt is by Frances Arnold and the four needle felted and embroidered pieces are by Mary Ann Mauney.

Ice Dyeing Results

2011-09-10T06:36:00.006-04:00

OMG, they're beautiful! See? No need for exposing yourself to powder dyes for no reason...just use yesterday's recipe for dye concentrate and put it in sprayers and hair color bottles with tiny tops. Again, don't breathe in the spray either; use a mask. Here are the finished pieces:

The one above was the accordion folded one in yesterday's photos.

Above is a close-up of the previous photo.

What do you think? I don't see much difference between the powder application and the concentrate application, and the concentrate is so much safer for our lungs.

Hint:
In order to use this technique for large pieces like quilt backing fabric, it may be easier to use the low water idea of pouring soda ash solution over the fabric. You can let the soda ash solution sit for 15 minutes, fold your fabric as desired and then add ice and color. Here's the formula for the amount of soda ash solution to add to your piece: 1 yard of fabric gets 1 cup of soda ash solution (perhaps slightly more), so a large backing would be about 9 yards with 9 1/2 cups of soda ash solution.

If you have any questions, just ask.

Ice Dyeing: My Safer Way

2011-09-09T17:27:00.008-04:00

Everyone who knows me knows that I am a stickler for extreme caution when using powdered Procion MX dye and other dye powders. So when I saw Quilting Arts' ice dyeing article this month I liked the idea, but decided to give it my "safety first" twist.

I had some concentrated dyes already made up for low-water immersion dyeing (2 tbsp. dye powder + 2 tbsp. urea + 1 cup of water). I keep these dyes in dish detergent bottles with flip-up tops; they have never leaked because they're made to hold liquid.

Safety tips: ***We do not mix dye powders without a small particle mask, gloves, and safety glasses, and we mix them in an enclosed box that has been sprayed with water to catch loose particles. We also, after carefully spooning dye into the container with a funnel, immediately dip the spoon & funnel into water and cover the dye container and dye bottle and dunk them into the water to clean off any loose dye. Be sure to find directions for all of this online or in a class.

I know... I'm a safety nerd.

To prepare to ice dye, I poured different colors of concentrated dye into tiny spray bottles (found at Sally's Beauty Supply in Georgia) and hair color bottles with tiny pointed tops...

For the rest of the ice dyeing directions, please refer to the August/September issue of Quilting Arts Magazine. I followed their directions, but instead of using loose dye powder (YIPES!!!), I sprayed and dribbled my dye concentrate onto the ice while wearing a mask (because of the fine mist of the spray). Here are a few photos of dyeing in progress:

The ice on this piece has melted and it will set until tomorrow. We'll see tomorrow how these dyed fabrics compared to the "powdered dye" fabrics.

Continued...

Fabrics from Shibori Class

2011-09-06T13:28:00.003-04:00

Okay, these are not the best fabrics from the class, but they are mine. On some of these pieces I used soda soaked fabric and that doesn't work as well as regular fabric for Shibori, but it was experimentation day. Having said that, I like my fabrics, and here they are...

This last piece is a heavy linen that was on the pole and tied for Shibori...

Cool!

Sewing Machines

2011-09-05T22:16:00.004-04:00

Everyone who knows me at all knows that I love sewing machines.

While on a trip to Florida earlier this year my husband bought this gem for $15 at a yard sale. She just got a tune up this weekend and a new/used cabinet and she's the latest addition to my studio.

Shibori Class

2011-09-04T08:48:00.008-04:00

Yesterday I took a wonderful Shibori class from Heather Allen-Swarttow at the Cloth Fiber Worksho p in Asheville, NC. Shibori is the Japanese method of tying or stitching fabric for design before dyeing. I had taken a class from Heather previously and learned a great deal, and I wasn't disappointed yesterday! Thank you, Heather!

Here are some images from the class. When my fabrics are dry I'll post them...

Binding Application Trick

2011-08-30T15:00:00.004-04:00

Dear walking-foot creators:

Please design a walking foot that has a 1/4" mark or edge for quilters. Problem: There is no marking that allows us to sew a straight 1/4" line when applying our bindings...and I want the judge to avoid criticizing this binding.

Since this will take a while to implement, I decided to design my own solution to the binding edge problem. I used a sliver of soap and marked my binding, measuring from the folded edge, 3/4" all the way down the length of the binding. That gave me a perfect 1/4" line to follow down the edge of the quilt!

The corners of this quilt binding were so easy to to fold!

TAP on Art Labels

2011-08-29T16:49:00.007-04:00

Today I used TAP, Transfer Artist's Paper, to print and then transfer images and wording to would-be labels for my quilts.

It was a rough start as you can see from the sheet on the left, but it printed out correctly on the second try: (yes, I printed on paper first but still messed up)

With this type of transfer, the printing must be mirrored. Next, I transferred the print and image to a piece of fabric for my label...

I decided that, since I can easily hand stitch an applique circle, I would make the label in the shape of a circle for easy application. How many times have you made a square or rectangular label that was difficult to apply because of the corners? Yeah, me too. Had enough of that.

I have a 6" circle made of template plastic already, so I placed the plastic piece over the label fabric. It was then easy to mark a 1/4" circle around the 6" finished center for a seam allowance.

I cut out the circle on the marker line...

I'll use the needle-turn applique method to apply the label to the back of the quilt, so next I cut out a 6" circle of freezer paper. I pressed the waxy side of the freezer to the back of the circular label, making sure that it was centered.

When this label is attached to the quilt, I'll post another photo (that should be soon). Voila!

Preparation for Fall Shows

2011-08-28T11:10:00.005-04:00

This week we started preparations for our upcoming Fall shows as vendors. The first show will be in Marietta, GA (metro Atlanta), Georgia Celebrates Quilts, with the East Cobb Quilt Guild. For the rest of the Fall calendar, you can click here.

Bill made these wonderful wall stands to hold fabric. Judy Simmons gave us the directions and information on how to make them.

They're perfect for showing plenty of fabric without taking much room in the 10' x 12' booth. Thanks Judy!

Silk Papermaking

2011-08-23T08:50:00.007-04:00

I'm quite an amateur at it, but this week I'm doing my best to make silk paper. I've got directions for three or four different methods and I think I found the one I like best. Here are some results:

The piece above is made with silk roving and Angelina fibers.

This piece is made with ginkgo leaves. I actually planted the tree so that I could use its lovely leaves for my artwork.

This last piece is made with some dried rose petals from a bouquet my sons gave me last year.

The paper is not as uniform as I'd like, and it would be nice to have some color, so the next time I'll dye the silk first.

The next plan with this technique is to make silk paper fish and assorted sea life to apply to this piece:

Fun!

Anything Fiber

2011-08-19T06:19:00.006-04:00

Over the last month I've been preparing for the Anything Fiber Sale and Swap in Black Mountain, NC. It's a yard sale with arts and art supplies, and I am one with too much "stuff" in her stash, so I'll have a selling booth.

Here's a list of some of the items I'll have for sale: fiber art books, fabric (including hand dyed fabric), notions, needles & pins, free stuff, buttons, pincushions, yarn, wool roving, knitting notions and much more.

I was working on the buttons this week...

These two are my gems (not for sale, though), by Coco Chanel.

Come and join us!

More DSP in Indigo

2011-08-15T10:07:00.003-04:00

I'm just having a ball this week making deconstructed screen printed pieces in indigo color with Procion MX dye. Here are some of the finished pieces alongside some of the indigo fabrics I own; they'll make great partners...

My screen print is on the left, and on the right is a Japanese indigo piece from Waechter's Fine Fabrics in Asheville, NC. Waechter's (pronounced Wockters) often has beautiful authentic indigos from Japan. They also have revamped their website so check it out by clicking on the link above.

Here's another Japanese indigo and my screen print.

Again, the piece on the left is mine, but the piece on the right is from In The Beginning Fabrics. Here's a closeup of this beauty...

What is it about indigo that I can't resist?

Screen Printing

2011-08-13T07:36:00.004-04:00

Yesterday Mary Ann and I gave a deconstructed screen printing demo to the ladies of the Fiber Frenzy group. I forgot my camera, so have no photos of the meeting, but here are the pieces I screened...

This series started at the bottom left and went around to the top left. For the last print I was running out of color on the screen so I added a little thickened purple dye.

The series above isn't finished yet as there is still more dye on the screen. The darkest screen came first. This is my favorite of all my screens so far.

My plan is to combine some of these screen prints with Japanese indigo fabrics to make a blue and white piece.

Leaf Challenge

2011-08-10T06:12:00.004-04:00

Friday's Fiber Frenzy meeting will include not only our Deconstructed Screen Printing demo, but also the group's "leaf" challenge. So, while we were screen printing this weekend, we also printed our challenge pieces.

Mine is not finished, but here's what I have so far...

These prints are made with small elephant ear leaves. This was the first time I had ever used a size 12 thread; Mary Ann introduced me to it and it's nearly the width of several strands of embroidery floss. It gives a wonderful dimensional look to machine quilting.

Here's another leaf print from this weekend. The indigo and white prints are my favorite. I use the indigo colored Procion MX dye, not actual indigo dye.

Art Weekend

2011-08-06T15:18:00.010-04:00

On Friday, Mary Ann Mauney and I had planned to make samples for a program, Deconstructed Screen Printing, that we're giving to the Fiber Frenzy group next week. The planned "single day" of art has turned into three days.

We decided that since it takes so long to set up our deconstructed screen printing equipment, we should print a second day. Today, we decided that we should print again tomorrow. Here's part of the setup...

We've also taken over the laundry room and deep sink. We have a total of 10 different colors of thickened dyes, six screens (we're making more tonight) and lots of finished pieces.

Here's one of my screens with thickened dye ready to dry on it. The image comes from a rubbing plate...

These are my indigo colored pieces...

Did you know that blue-and-white decor is coming back? It's a classic, but Architectural Digest (my favorite mag.) featured some home decorating with blue & white rooms last month.

This is two days worth of my prints...

Here's Mary Ann working on one of her pieces...

We just can't stop! It's too much fun--and yes, we don't want to start the clean up.