painted shibori

One of the pictures I showed in the previous blogpost was of fabric wrapped around a pole. The traditional way of doing shibori is to put the pole into a dyebath. The layers of fabric closest to the pole will absorb less dye than the layer at the outside. If you want to avoid that you can use a big pole or use paint instead of dye. I did not have a pole big enough, so I used paint on this piece of fabric. To do that you have to prepare your pole. When the fabric is scrunched down like you want it, you soak the fabric with tab water and let this dry completely. The next step is to unwind the thread and remove the fabric carefully from the pole and place it on top of a flat surface like this:

 With a foam brush I lightly applied turqois fluid acrylic paint from Golden on top of the fabric. As long as you do this carefully only the top ridges of the fabric will be touched by the paint. In this picture about half of the fabric was done:

 When the paint had dried, I ironed the fabric and this is how it looks now:

ice dyeing

Earlier this week I realised that I had not dyed in months. Time to do something about that. I soda soaked half a yard of fabric and crunched that into a container. Placed the container in the freezer till the next day. As my stash of blues and greens is getting a bit low, I decided on dyeing blue. There was a bit of cerulean blue in a container and I mixed that with some aqua. No measuring, just playing. This mixture I poored over the frozen fabric and left it there for a couple of hours. The result was this:
   
                                     
Usuable, but a bit pale. It needs a bit more, so I divided the fabric into two fat quarters. One I rolled on a tube like this:
 

 Usually you use dyes with shibori, but for this piece I am going to use textile paints. More about that in a couple of days. The other piece of fabric I placed into a plastic bag - the container is to prevent leaking on my radiator - and pounded diluted textile paints all over it. The coming days the paint will creep into the folds of the fabric as a result of capillary action. In about a week this piece will be ready. Pictures will come later.

Letter

When in May I was with my friend Kelly I started a number of tops. Her studio is much more spacious than mine and it is a pleasure working there. Now it is time to turn these tops into quilts. Right now I am working on The Letter. Background is dyed a light blue to resemble an airmail letter. Size of the fabric is around 40"x50" (1 mtr x 1,25 mtr). This fabric was taped to a piece of board with duck tape. I forgot to take pictures of the process, but the next step was to apply a layer of pancake mixture over it as a resist.  A messy process, but fun to do. While the resist was still wet I copied a part of a letter my late husband wrote me. I did the writing with the back of a paint brush. This was left to dry for 2 days. The resist was washed off and I got a nice craquelé effect in the background of the letter.
Now it is time to do the quilting. Using an all over design would not be fitting, so I decided to keep it simple and only outline all the individual letters. Here you see a detail of it:

It is a time consuming process. Especially as I don't like to doublestitch at the beginning and end, but prefer to hide the thread ends. I can assure you, there are a lot of thread ends :-)). Most of my time last week was taken up by it and I am not even half way.

Another bird quilt finished

And another bird quilt has been finished! This one started out as a handdyed piece of fabric which I created in May. On it I used Lumiere textile paint to paint the ruine and the palm trees. The birds are fused applique. This quilt is around 40"x40" (100x100 cm) and heavily machine quilted. I have to measure it to know the exact size. Title is: Swallows of San Juan de Capistrano, a city in Southern California known for the annual migration of cliff swallows.

On this picture you can see some of the details of the quilting I did: