Stuff to show

Here's the New York Beauty block finished - yes, the dark green background in the geese row is a tiny bit wonky at the bottom - I will probably unpick it and put in a slightly larger piece before sending it. Otherwise, I think it's come out well. And it's the last birthday block - woo hoo. This swap has felt very long and somewhat tiring - not so much making the blocks as the admin stuff this time around, so I am quite glad to see it winding up. It's also produced some great blocks, which keeps me from getting too frustrated!

And here's the second Easter Sampler finished - this one's to keep. I will dig a few buttons or charms out to add to the larger empty spaces (the original had buttons included of course) - and then, complete. I hope that by next Easter I'll be able to remember where I put it if I put it in a "safe place" when finished... I won't be stitching this again, so if anyone wants the pattern, let me know.



Got some nice post today as well as doing a bit of work - this set of loot is some items I bought from Julie's etsy shop - isn't the packaging great? She showed the little notebooks on her blog, and I really liked them and thought one would make a nice gift (though I am tempted to keep it myself, lol) and when I went to her shop, I found this great bracelet. Wow. When the parcel arrived I also found inside this lovely hat/scarf pin included just because she's a generous and kind person. How nice is that! I have a few of Julie's other creations - a pair of earrings with little blue birds and silver nests on which I bought from her shop and a wonderful notebook which I received when I took part in her pay-it-forward offer, a while back. I love her work; something about it really appeals to me.



I also received these things in the post recently - the pieces from the resist swap I did a piece for recently (mine is the rubber-band shibori in the top middle) and a couple of ATCs - one from Wil - we swapped a while back and she waited to send hers until she posted the resist swap pieces to me; the other is from Kathy as part of the recycle spring swap on Fibre Art Traders, for which I made these ATCs. She also included a little book as a small hostess gift as she is taking part in my birthday ATC swap this year. As I said, a great day or two for post!

Monoprinting

The challenge this month on Textile Challenges is to revisit (or visit, if that's the case) mono-printing and make an ATC using some of the results. I decided first to play with my NeoColour crayons again - I drew some squares on a handy piece of plastic, sprayed them with water, then printed onto this previously rust-dyed piece. Below you can see the piece face down, absorbing the colours and on the right, the right side of the piece once printed. I like this sort of muted, water-colour effect - I think it will make some nice backgrounds.



I then decided to try a similar thing, but with acrylic paints - again I used my big square ruler as a surface for printing and just dabbed the paint on more or less randomly. I printed this time onto a darker piece of fabric, and am very pleased with the result, which actually looks even better dried. I think this might form the basis of my ALQS3 - the centre part, at least. It's not big enough to be the whole quilt. We'll see how it goes, but I do have some ideas.

Once I'd printed it, there was still quite a bit of paint left on the ruler, so I added a few more colours, misted it with water and printed it again, this time onto green - obviously the second time round colours didn't print as strongly, but I still think it makes a promising background.

It was a nice thing I got a chance to work this morning, as it looks unlikely for the rest of the week - tomorrow I think I will end up at school all day - there's an open day in the morning which I have been roped in to help with, so there goes my morning. Wednesday I usually go swimming in the morning, and Thursday I need to run into Kingston to pick up a flute - Olivia is going to start learning flute and I need to collect the hired instrument from the shop. Perhaps if I have a little extra time I will treat myself to a visit to the bead shop while I'm there, just to console myself. Of course, Thursday is also the first meeting of the quilting club at school, so I guess there will be a little sewing - or at least some prep work! I'll probably just spend most of my time threading needles...

A day to dye for...

Spent part of the day today dyeing, as I am taking part in a resist swap. I decided to do rubber band resist (my favourite) though I did do a small piece with elmer's glue, which I really liked (I've done this before, but today's was better) and may well do some more of those in the near future. I tend to only dye once in a while as I have to get lots of stuff out and it takes up space and so on - if I had a wet studio (or a basement or utility room) I might dye more as I could leave supplies out and leave things batching more conveniently, etc.

Anyway, the kids wanted to help, so I dug out a few old white t-shirts we had lying around as well as a white duvet cover we got ages ago with the intent to dye. We also did some shibori (folding, tying, banding) (like the pipe one, which didn't turn out - I think it was a problem with the fabric, which, although it was in my dyeing stash, didn't take up the dye well in places - my hunch is it wasn't PFD and needs scouring before dyeing with!) and some parfaits (layering fabric in containers and adding colours). Quite a few things turned out well, luckily, though Olivia's shirts weren't quite as colourful after washing as before - she still likes them, though.

The spiral one didn't get enough dye in the middle - which I suspected might be the case - if she wants, we'll over dye it next time we have a dyeing day. The red/yellow/brown one worked better, though it still has a fair amount of white in the centre (I might throw this one in a pale yellow...)

Alex's shirt, on the other hand, worked better, because we didn't fold it up much - did it flat. He put some rubber bands in it, then picked the colours to do the bunched sections, then I did the background with a pale green. He loves it - partly because it's cool, partly because he made it himself.

Here's the duvet cover - quite successful considering how much fabric there was once it was folded up. It seems to have lost a lot of the red, which worried me, but looking back, I think it was actually Hot Pink they used, a dye with which I've had problems before - it just seems really pale. Personally, I like the subtlety and remarkably, it looks like this on both sides - the dye has really gone through nicely. I got the duvet cover from the LaRedoute catalogue and have dyed their bedsheets before as well (yes, the gathered ones - that was fun!) with good success, so I do recommend them if you are looking for inexpensive white goods which dye well. Sarah gets to have the duvet cover on her bed first as she didn't get a shirt (nothing in her size knocking around).

The right hand photo is the rubber-band shibori for the resist swap. This is one of my favourite ways of dyeing fabric - you can see it in process in the top photo - it's the alien looking thing in the tray at the front - I rubber band (with nothing inside) bits of fabric- kind of like doing stones, only with no stones - sometimes a single band, sometimes two or three, then add dye with a small pipette to these peaks. Once that's done, I add colour to all the valley areas. I love the control this gives and I love the effect of the rings. This is a metre piece, but I am only swapping 5 eighths, so I will have some to keep.

And finally, the green is a fat quarter which I wrote on with Elmer's Gel Glue - I managed to get the glue to come out quite thin, which is why I think it worked better than the last time I tried it. I just used random, positive words - next time, I might try a piece of text. Then I dried it on the line so the glue would be dry, and threw it in a cup of green dye. Worked really well I think. The fabric was pre-soaked in soda ash and dried in this instance, but I'm not sure it would have mattered.

On the right are two FQs of the fabric which didn't work with the pipe shibori - these pieces were done by cramming them in cups and adding different dye colours - you can see how much white is left - and the two sides of the fabric (i.e. front and back) are different, so there was clearly a penetration issue - sizing left on the fabric or something. As it happens, it's worked to a really nice effect on these two pieces, even if it didn't work on the shibori at all!

Screenprinting

Here's something I got in the post today - no work done again (nursery in the morning and helping with school photos being taken in the afternoon) but at least I got these lovely screenprinted fabrics in the post - hoorah!

Dyeing day

So, today, I devoted more or less the whole day to catching up on dyeing and related stuff - actually, only related stuff, as no actual dye was involved - it was all paint and stuff like that. The first order of business was 8 fat eights of complex cloth for a swap - I decided to see if there was something in my stash that was suitable to use as a starting point - and found this lovely shibori piece. It's big enough to cut into 8 pieces for the swap, but I decided to work on it as a whole peice rather than individually. The first step I added to it was to screenprint some designs onto it in various colours. I then hung it up to dry and worked on the pieces for the screen printing swap (below) but for the sake of brevity, I'll go through the entire complex cloth at once. After the screen printing, I added some stamps in various MetaMica colours (my mom helped with this) and then added some texture using Markal paint sticks and a stencil. Finally, I sprayed a bit with whatchamacallit - Mountain Mist? Something like that - too lazy to go upstairs and check it! Now I just have to wait until the paint sticks dry and then heat set it - could be a few days - those things take FOREVER to dry!

I caught up with a couple of complex cloth round robins (I've only had them a short time, but they were delayed before they got to me) - I added stencilled paint sticks to both pieces - the one on the right is actually more subtle than it appears.

And below are the pieces I screen printed -I used a variety of stencils added onto the screen with tape and printer labels - there are actually four pieces with stars on them, but they are much the same, so I haven't showed them all - lots of pictures in this post already with those to bulk it up!

And finally, here's some post - yesterday, I received this little mini quilt (which is flatter than in the photo - it was folded in its envelope) from the September 6-12" swap with my flickr swap group; today I received this Batik Beauties postcard from Di. Wow. Tomorrow, there won't be much to show, though, as my mother and I are going up to town - we might do a guided walk - haven't decided for sure yet. Should be fun, regardless, despite not getting any work done.

Rusty

Here are some lovely fabrics I got in the post today - from the rusted fabric exchange with my surface embellishment group. The variety is remarkable and the pieces are lovely. Not sure how I will use them yet, but I certainly will use them!


And here are two recent finishes - I have done the binding on both of these piecs now - the Jacob's Ladder is a 12" block and the basket is about 22" square, I think. Both are now finished and ready to go off to new homes - not sure where the basket is going yet, as it happens, but we'll get there before long. If you'd like a chance to own it, check out my post about my blogversary giveaway!

Hoorah for traffic!

(I know, it's an odd title for a post - what happened was, we were going to go out this afternoon, but we got stuck in such bad traffic, we turned around and went home, which gave me several free hours in which I could do even more work than I had already done today - which turned today into a VERY productive day - a thing I've not had much of recently...)

This morning, I put together all the lovely hand-dyed pieces for Ursula's comfort quilt - in the end, I did 10" squares, as 12" squares, plus sashing, was getting a little large. This is still fairly large, but if she's going to be in a rehab unit for a long time, perhaps she can keep it on her bed there to brighten things up... Anyway, as expected, it's rather gorgeous, as the fabrics are so amazing. I'm glad I choose cream (over black, which was the other contender) - it's cheery and light and will show the quilting nicely. I pieced the back as well, from two pieces of hand-dyes - one of which was long enough but not wide enough, so I inserted a narrowish strip of a different hand-dye down the centre. Now just to pin together and quilt...



And here are the bonus things I got done - a little box, which I hope will be for a swap I'm doing, hosted by Carole, which is called "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" - I say I hope, because it's a 3D item, and I need to check that's ok before I send it out. The elements are: old - the box, which used to have greeting cards in it and the grey fabric on top, which came from a pair of Olivia's school trousers which split in the seat and had a hole in the knee and were therefore in the bin in my sewing room; new - the dragonfly decorations on the top, which I bought at Hever yesterday; borrowed - the dragonfly picture on the top, which I borrowed from Carole's blog; blue - the paper I covered the bottom of the box with and the fibres on the top.

And the cards are my "U is for..." cards - U is for Umbel, in this case. These are a photo, printed onto fabric, with thread painting on top. I thought those were going to be late (they are due in the post tomorrow) but I have managed to sneak in just under the wire - provided I get to the post office tomorrow, of course!

Gift bearing...

Picked up my mother from the airport this morning, and consequently, didn't get much work done myself, though I did work on the summer quilties a little while she had a brief rest. Doesn't matter, though, as she always comes with loads of lovely things for me, so I can show lots of photos. Sometimes, it's stuff I've ordered, but on this occasion, it was some gifts, along with some hand-dyed fabric members of my dyeing group have sent along to make a comfort quilt for another member who had an aneurysm recently - I offered to assemble the pieces together, quilt it, and send it back home with my mom when she goes home in 3 weeks' time. Needless to say, it's going to be a very simple quilt.

Anyway, above is a selection of fat quarters - I have quite possibly the mother with the best combination of traits - she likes to buy fabric, but doesn't sew, herself. So she gives me the fabric. Honestly - the sacrifices we make for our relatives!! Anyway, some fabrics above left, and above right some bits and pieces from various thrift shops, yard sales and so on. She also bought me a large ziploc bag of rubber stamps at a yard sale, but no photo of those - some will definitely be useful, some less so, but it doesn't matter as the whole bag only cost $5...





And here are the fabrics for the comfort quilt - the final photo is stuff people enclosed for me to keep, but the other 5 photos show the fabrics for the quilt - I'm just going to do 12" squares and sash them with cream - keep it simple and let the fabric do the talking. There are 23 pieces (24 including my own which is not in the photo) so it even works out, number wise! I plan to do it very soon, so watch for progress. Anyway, nice treasure trove, isn't it!