A peek at Roots and some Dyed Work

Here is a picture of Roots, my April Reveal for Interpret This!  For more pictures and information about the art quilt, please checkout the blog over there. The one thing I will tell you here is that I am mega impressed with myself.  Okay, the quilt is not perfect and I can find lots of faults in it but I am so excited that it used to be just a plain piece of white fabric.  I designed it.  I dyed it.  I carved a lino stamp.  I printed it. I embroidered.  I quilted.  I thread painted.  I whatever.  It used to be a plain piece of white cloth and now it is an art quilt.  And I did it all myself.   Isn't that just way too cool?

Anyway, on to the reason I started writing this post.  I have been doing some other printing and dyeing the last few weeks.  Here are a couple of the pieces I like the most. ( Like, do you really want to see my failures??)

This piece is a late spring snow dye.  A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning it was supposed to rain.  Well, it snowed instead.  Big, huge, wet flakes.  The ground was too warm for them to stick but our cars ended up with about an 1.5 inches on them. " Ah HAH!"  I said, my last chance of the season to snow dye.  I quickly got my wicker laundry basket, put a piece of white fabric in the bottom, covered it with snow, and ran to get my dyes.  Then it occurred to me that I really should have wet the fabric with a soda solution or all the dye in the world would not help.  Hmm... what to do.  Not enough snow to dump and start over.   I mixed a little soda water with a little dye, squirted it all on the snow, and hoped for the best.  I think it turned out pretty well!

This piece stared out as a jar dye project but I did not add enough dye. Way too much white.  So then I folded it and placed some triangle resist shapes on it and overdyed it.  Better but nothing special.  After printing my Roots lino for my Interpret This challenge, I used the leftover dye to print a wooden trivet I had bought for 50 cents.  Ahh...  now I think the fabric is starting to show some promise.