Direct Dye

Last week my friend Eileen was encouraging me to try dipping my ready-for-dye fabrics into soda ash solution (the dye fixative) first and then dyeing them. I have done some pieces before, but when I saw Martha Lever's direct dye pieces on her blog a couple of days ago, I was inspired to try that method again.

Here are the results:

Foam brush and lightly diluted dye...

Foam piece, painted on the side and used as a stamp...

Wood block with strips of weather stripping glued to it for use as a stamp.

Fun!

From the Mountains to the Sea

It was a whirlwind week as we traveled through the Great Smokey Mountains to Asheville, NC and home to Athens for one day before visiting friends in the Pensacola, FL area. We lived in lovely Navarre, FL for almost seven years and it's a treat to go back. Here's why...

Wonderful friends like the Killer Bees of Pensacola : (top left) Agnes, Ann, Jolene, Joyce, Eileen, Joyce, Anita (that's me), (bottom left) Barbara, Pat, Wynnell, Mary Elma and Dorothy.

Beautiful views: Perdido Key near the FloraBama line

Terrific show-n-tell by the Killer Bees

Wynnell's piecing with Pat's red string blocks

Dorothy's Louisiana bee's blocks

Dorothy's lovely rail fence with a star point.

And the Santa Rosa (County) Quilters Guild show-n-tell

This quilt was adorable and was made with a wedge template. (I took 4 photos of this lady and her work trying to catch her name tag and I had no such luck)

These last two were my contributions to show-n-tell. These are variations on string quilts.

I have truly been blessed by participating in these two groups. I miss you all!

Same Trip, New Town

On Friday afternoon we arrived in Asheville, NC for the annual Asheville Quilt Show at the Arboretum and now also with a Rotary Club sponsored venue at the nearby mall.

This was one of my favorite quilts (above) because at the center of each rectangular block was a hand-made fabric bead. Deborah A. Morgan made this quilt and I believe she also has similar pieces hanging in a lovely gallery in Waynesville, NC.

Ruth Powers made this lovely quilt entitled Lazy Afternoon in which the horses hugging each other. You know there was stiff competition because this quilt did not win a ribbon.

Dee Werner and...

...Sharon Smaldone made these quilts for the AQG silent auction following the string quilt workshop I taught for the AQG in June. How exciting! I love the border applications Dee used to spice up her piece, and Sharon used a metallic thread with a hint of red for some zing!

Travels

This week we enjoyed a lovely trip through the Great Smokey Mountains as we traveled from Cherokee, NC to Gatlinburg, TN and then down I-40 to Asheville, NC. Cherokee is a fine, peaceful town on the Cherokee Reservation with a beautiful, shallow river running through downtown where fishermen take up the early morning hours, and children play during the day.

The smoke-like mists of early morning in the mountains were gone by the time we got to a higher altitude, but the views were lovely...

I could enjoy some of the walking sites on my scooter. This scooter causes a stir everywhere we go...kids want one, and folks who have been in a cast before love the idea of it. It's a lot better than crutches (available at medical supply stores).

Fabric Day

Today I am working with a lot of fabric for different reasons...


This morning I started out dyeing fabric for my upcoming vendor booth at the East Cobb Quilt Guild Show (Sept. 18 - 20 in Marrietta, GA), so I decided to try another direct dye technique. I bought some Elmer's Gel School Glue and used it to make designs on fabric yesterday as discussed in a recent Quilting Arts Mag. article.





The glue dried overnight, and this morning I mixed a small amount of Procion MX dye solution with its fixative, soda ash solution, to make dye paint. Here's how the experiment turned out.





When it dries I'll rinse it with my other dyed fabrics to remove the water-soluble glue.



I have also been collecting fabrics for a string quilt for my nephew AJ's freshman year at RIT (Rochester Inst. of Tech.). Gotta start sewing because he moves into his dorm room on Aug. 30th! The school colors are orange and brown but some of the sports uniforms are orange and black, so I'll use all three colors for his quilt. These shirts from Goodwill (re-used fabrics can be wonderful) will go into the quilt to add a "male" touch...



And I found these fabrics in my stash...



The colors will blend in the quilt to make an overall look of orange, brown & black. That's the beauty of string piecing.

Duh, it just occurred to me that I can use this direct dye technique to add words and rough pictures to AJ's quilt! Fellow crafters and artists, this is why we write our ideas down!

Painting Fun

This afternoon I was preparing for a demo I'll teach at the Asheville Quilt Guild Show on Saturday, August 8 at 1:00. The quilt show runs all weekend and our Fiber Arts Alliance group has volunteered to be in charge of demos during the show. Join us!


My demo is about changing fabrics to suit our needs, especially black and white fabrics.

I used watered-down ProFab textile paint to paint over the dry black & white fabric to the left. The white & purple piece in the center was wet first to allow the paint to spread.

These pieces were all painted very easily to change their look.




These were the diluted paint pieces, some dipped and some painted on.





This was my favorite piece of the day, and it was the only one I hadn't planned to do. This highly diluted Lumiere paint was dropped from a fine tipped bottle in an unplanned pattern of drops. As the drops spread, the luminescent pieces in the paint stayed in the center and the paint spread in a ring around it. For this color, I used a combination of small amounts of Lumiere #571 Pearl Turquoise and #556 Halo Blue-Gold and enough water to make it very thin (like a wash). The resulting color is a perfect match to a lovely Surf & Sand fabric by Michele D'Amore!

Direct Dye Practice

This week I played a little with direct dye; the application of dye with the fixative added so that the dye sets immediately to the fabric. This time I used dry fabric, foam stamps, and a foam brush to apply the dye to the stamps.

Dry fabric gives the stamp image crisp edges. This is the finished piece just before dyeing it again. And next is the piece (still wet) after over-dyeing with sage colored dye.

Would you have guessed that the yellow would remain when over-dyed? It was a surprise to me!

Here's one of my practice machine quilting pieces. The stitches are becoming more regular, finally. I love the pussy willow design at the top of the piece, and above that is a small sample of using Fabrico Markers to fill in color after quilting.