Friday Favorites

If you like snow dye you will love this post.  Lisa was nice enough to post a PDF with instructions for snow and ice dyeing.  She learned her technique from this site with a tutorial on snow dye.  I love snow dyeing but now that I have learned how to ice dye, I am content to miss out on the cold weather.  Unfortunately it is supposed to snow tonight.  YIKES!

Terry has been redesigning her studio and was nice enough to post instructions for making a sewing table and an island.  My studio is a cobbled together assortment of tables of almost the same height with my sewing machine sitting on top all designed the purpose of making my shoulders and neck hurt if I sew for too long.  Perhaps Terry has a good idea.  Hmmmm...

Kim has created some lovely boxes. They are not technically made of fabric unless you count the bondaweb or heavy interfacing but they are gorgeous.  She doesn't include much in the way of instruction since she is teaching a class and has a new book.  But I might give them a try anyway.

Judy shows some pictures from April's show.  I absolutely love the "vintage doilies"  held by the colorful resin hands. How come I am not that creative??  I think it is genius!

Progress on Composted Fabric

I am really in love with my composted fabric.  Here is my progress on the first quilt I am making with it.

 I hand-stitched some lines on a piece of black linen and then laid the material on top.  Looked like tree trunks to me so I took the fabric off, stamped some leaves (using leaves) in fabric paint, and then added one piece of the fabric back.  I have two more strips to add.  Here is a close up of the loose stitching I am doing to attach the fabric.

Composting Fabric

Did I tell  you last spring when I put some fabric into the compost heap to see what would happen?  I tore some white cotton fabric into strips of varying widths and the width of the fabric.  I then wrapped the fabric strips around some old copper pipes.  I laid the fabric-wrapped pipes into my compost pile in the backyard and ignored them for several months.

Cold weather is quickly approaching in Maine so I decided it was time to pull the pipes out and see what had happened. Well, first, the fabric-wrapped pipes were covered with..ahh... compost.  I guess I should not have been surprised but boy were they yucky. I had to do some cleaning before I could even get them to the tub.  Here they are fresh out of the compost pile.

Then they went into the tub for a shower and a soaking.  While trying to rub off the yuck, the fabric was sloughing off in little slimy clumps.  When the fabric/pipes were as clean as I could get them, I sat them on end to dry for a few days.  Next step was to carefully, very gingerly, unwrap the fabric from the pipe. Second step was to iron the fabric flat so I could see what I had.  Oh my! Here are some samples of the fabric now.   I do like them!

 

Here is a beginning of a quilt using the fabric.

Here is a beginning of a quilt using the fabric.

Ice Dyeing

I had such a great time ice dyeing with FIVE so I tried it at home on my own.  I jury-rigged my laundry basket with sticks between the opening and a screen mesh over the sticks. I intentionally placed the sticks halfway up the sides of the laundry basket so that the ice  could be contained in the basket also. That was one of the problems we encountered when FIVE ice dyed--the pile of ice would slide off the top.

 To ice dye, I soda ashed some baby clothes and some fabric, scrunched them on top of the screen, and covered them with 10 lbs of ice.

 Then I squirted it full of dye.  The next part was the hardest.  It was letting the ice sit long enough to melt.  Da Da Da Da Dum Da Da.......... TA DA!

The material will turn into samples for my Fugitive Workshop. The baby clothes are going to Newborns in Need, an organization that provides clothes for babies coming home from the hospital.

Second Baby Quilt Finished

This one is going to New Mexico to a great-nephew.  By traditional definition it fails to be a quilt.  It has a pieced top and a flannel back but no middle.  How much heat do you really need in New Mexico?

Promised Pictures from FIVE Play Date

Saturday the FIVE gathered and we played with embossing and making leaf prints.  Here are my two examples of embossing.  The material is a hand dye I made by pole wrapping. The first is an oak leaf embossed in gold.  The second is a flower composition embossed in a clear sparkle, copper, and then black.  I think you can only really see the black but then when you get closer you can see the other two.  Makes a nice multi-level figure. (I didn't turn the picture so it is sideways in orientation. sorry)

After lunch we moved on to make paint prints of leaves. Here are mine.  I printed them on a old clean-up cloth of mine--as you can tell from the ring on one of them!  I will be enhancing these with fugitive medium.

Friday Favorites

 I have been thinking about making a mobile with things I have found on my beach walks.  I really like the design found in this blog for creating the frame of the mobile.

I adore it when an artist takes a class and blogs about it!  Penny is taking a class with Jane and has a couple of  posts that are exciting. Both are related to using shapes. The first is drawing the shapes and the second is fabric shapes.  I do hope that Penny posts more!

Have you found this challenge group yet?  Fiberactions is 12 artists who produce a new 16" x 20" quilt every other month based on a theme. This time the theme is Structure.  Last time it was Texture and there were some really interesting quilts.  Take a look at Sunset in the City.  It is a whole cloth quilt. Would you guess it?  But I think that Canyon Revisited is my favorite.  Are you surprised?  It is wonky and has hand stitching!

A thermofax screen give-away!  You  have till October 15 to sign up for it. C&T Publishing also has a give away.  You need to enter by Sunday, October 9, to have a chance to win some architecture inspired artwork.

Lots of dyeing results this week. This one is from Deb who used oatmeal, rice, etc as resists.  This one is from Constance Rose who used blackberries.