Can you guess what I've been doing?

Yesterday's dyed fabric that I rinsed and washed this morning to get out the excess dye...



Today's batch of dyed fabric...



Tonight's, or maybe tomorrow morning's, batch of fabric ready to dye...



You get one guess on what I've been doing lately. : )

Recovery Projects

While I'm recovering from foot surgery, I have quite a few projects to keep me busy. I've been working on one today: cutting and pricing some of the 50 or so yards of fabric that I dyed over the last two weeks. The dining room is the cutting and pricing area (as well as the pressing area)...

After the fabric is pressed, it is folded over the backs of the dining room chairs until I have time to cut it.

Here is this week's tally of cut and priced fabric...

We're testing to see if we like this piece of fabric as a curtain for our front door. It has been up for a few days. What do you think? Is it too much? When approaching the door it looks as though there is a mural on the glass. For now, anyway, it's keeping the sun out midday. I'll have a small project of making it into a curtain if we decide that it's "the one".

Fabric as Inspiration

Today I am working on a string pieced wall hanging. I started with this lovely piece of my hand-dyed fabric (right side) and wanted to create a contemporary version of attic windows from it. Here's what I have sewn so far...

These blocks are not yet trimmed to size, but they turned out better than I imagined. Love those yummy colors!

Hand-dyed Fabric

This is one of the pieces I dyed while instructing a hand-dyed fabric class this week. I was teaching the students how to fold a swirl and how to apply the two colors.

Vendor Booth Days

We need a little more color here...

We have been enjoying the Cotton Patch Quilt Show (see previous blog for a link) this weekend just south of Athens, GA at the Oconee County Civic Center. The show floor plan is wonderful and we have plenty of fine vendors. I have three quilts (no new ones to post) and a post card in the show and have won three Honorable Mention awards.

Our hand-dyed fabric booth is doing very well. All of Bill's wonderful booth inventions (stands, wall, displays) look great, and his Ruler Racks are selling like hotcakes.

Yardage is selling well, but the best seller has been the basket of hand-dyed scraps, 5" x 18", or the equivalent, for 75 cents per piece. I dyed yardage pieces with an extra 8" or so of fabric so that I could have 5" wide cuts plus string cuts from each piece. The string cuts are for string quilt class kits and for my own quilts this year. It seems to have been a good plan.

One of the other vendors calls that circle piece on the wall the "fried egg" fabric. haha The tiny rolling "desk" we found at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store is working perfectly in the booth.

Here is the next big idea for our booth from my hubby, Bill...

This rust-dyed piece is called "Clam Baked in '68". Isn't it great?! He's placed it onto a frame board and will frame it when his idea jells. Can you tell he's a vintage hippie? He doesn't like the term "old hippie". ;-) He is a social butterfly and is in his element working the booth with me this weekend. More on the show later...

Vendor Booth Prep for Tomorrow

Tomorrow is set-up day for vendor booths at the Cotton Patch Quilt Show, and we have been hard at work for weeks preparing for it. Bill has been very busy making racks and stands for merchandise. Ours is mainly a Hand-Dyed Fabric booth, but we will have several other items for sale: greeting cards, postcards, ruler racks and felted wool pincushions. Here's what the house looks like this afternoon...

This ruler rack will be hanging on the wall above the stand.

These quilt tops will hang on the booth wall; each of them uses a mixture of commercial and hand-dyed fabrics.

The pincusions have been drying in the studio, but these are ready to go...

The multi-colored yardage is so beautiful that I hate to fold it up. I'll find a place to hang it on the hanging racks.

We found this wonderful rolling stand (left) at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store. Bill painted it up to match the other booth components and now it will serve as our check-out stand. The basket on the right has a huge assortment of scraps for 75 cents each.

This rack was a nightstand, but Bill altered it by attaching a pole and "tree" on top (not shown) which will display quarter-yards of fabric. The fabric will hang down over the nightstand and will make viewing much easier. The drawer and baskets will hold fat quarters and pincushions. If you've never seen some of my display racks, here's an unfinished one from months ago. Bill has recently painted this one and attached my booth sign to the top...

...and this is how all of the hanging racks will display fabric. Whew! We're almost ready. Wish us luck!

Countdown...6 Days

Six days from now the Cotton Patch Quilt Show will have its awards night, and I will open my first major hand-dyed fabric vendor booth. It has been an incredibly busy month, but I've enjoyed it a great deal. Here are some photos from around the house/production floor...

This is the fold and price stack in the dining room.

Stacks of cool stuff...yards, half-yards, and multiple yards stacks, plus Bill's newly designed Ruler Racks and a beautiful sign he ordered for me.

More yards and half-yards.

Multi-yard pieces, quarter-yards and some fat-quarters.

These are some of the first wool felted pincushions for the show. I visited Main Street Yarns yesterday (I love that place!) for more lovely wool roving. Now let's head out to the garage/dye studio...

This is a 2-yard piece with the yellow at one end and the blue at the opposite end. Can't wait to rinse this one. This is low-water immersion dyeing with Procion MX dyes.

This doesn't look like much yet, but underneath the top layer is another mixed sunrise colored fabric. I layer my fabrics in the dye bath to conserve time and dye. The top layers will absorb the extra dye and will be a lighter color. The benefits are two-fold: more dyed fabric in the end, and less dye to wash out. Here's another dye bath where you can see the layers below...

If you'd like to know more about low-water immersion dyeing and dyeing in layers, check out Ann Johnston's book, Color by Accident.

It's time to create...

New Quilt

Today I was piecing a new quilt to use as a sample for the Scrappy Brick Quilt class I'm teaching on Saturday at the Dragonfly Quilt Shop. This blue quilt is an example of using the same basic "Scrappy Brick" pattern with "tiles" (squares) rather than "bricks" (rectangles). Here it is with four rows. Notice that there are no seams to match if the rows are sewn together as is...

Once I had all five rows sewn and had them up on the board, it occurred to me that the spacing between them added to the Asian look of the quilt. The indigo and white fabrics are from my Japanese and Indonesian collection and the light blue indigo is one of my hand-dyed fabrics.

So, I decided to add sashing between the rows. I've already cut the outer borders, but I wish I had made them wider. What do you think? The borders aren't sewn yet, so I may cut some wider ones (also, this photo is cropped a little, so check out the bottom photo).

Whew! High-use wall. I could barely squeeze the quilt onto the design wall.

Fabric Dyeing: Learning Lessons with Practice

As mentioned previously, I'm preparing to be a vendor at our quilt guild show, and my booth will feature hand-dyed fabric...so I'm dyeing, and dyeing, and dyeing.

Two days ago I dyed some fabric with a new "Lime" colored dye and it was less than pleasing to my taste. It wasn't that beautiful bright lime green; it was the color of lime peel, without much depth. Ick. The photo below captures some of that icky green mixed with a little Midnight Blue.

Anyway, today I over-dyed the lime-colored pieces and then dyed some new fabric, mixing the lime dye with other colors. That Lime is no longer my least favorite. Check out these photos and see what happens with a little color mixing...

Lime mixed with Grape (below)

Lime (light mixture) with light Grape

Lime with equal amount of Midnight Blue

Lime with Havana Brown

A little Lime with a lot of Midnight Blue

Humm, not bad!

Fabric Dyeing Day

I dyed fabric all day yesterday, and this morning I started, bright and early, doing it again. I end up taking some good long breaks to rest my feet, which usually drags the day out a little. This is our garage where most of the dyeing process happens. I need three tables to dye comfortably: one to hold "stuff", another clean space to manipulate and fold my fabric, and a third for a workspace.

I started making my dye solution (fabric, not hair) in 1/2 cup increments to avoid waste. Whatever full-strength dye is leftover must be refrigerated in a non-food storage area, so the less I have leftover, the better.

Once the fabric is in the dye, I carry it to the laundry room to sit for some hours before rinsing out the dye. The fabric almost always looks better wet and I try to avoid being disappointed in the finished product (after it's rinsed and dried). Of course, it will look fine, but it won't have the depth of color that the wet fabric has.

The fabric comes out of the dryer a little damp, and if I don't have time to press it right away, I put a sheet over the couch and lay out the fabric pieces to make them flat. They came out of the dryer at 11:30 last night and I was too pooped to stand at the ironing board to press them.

These fabrics are being dyed for my sales booth at the Cotton Patch Quilt Show which is being held in Watkinsville, GA (just south of Athens) March 6-8, 2009.

What do you think?

Call me crazy, but every time I look at this piece of fabric I dyed this past weekend it reminds me of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. What do you think?

Hand Dyes are Heaven 2

Not much to write today, but here are some of the fabrics I've dyed this week. All of these, and more, will be for sale at the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation's Holiday Market this weekend in Watkinsville, GA.