Start is finished

A bit of a strange title for this post :-), but what I wanted to say is that the quiltlet with the theme Start is completed. Here is a picture of it. In reality the knitting is a bit more turquoise than the picture shows. From the needles the yarn goes over the quilt and ends in a little ball hanging under the quilt. It is not a masterpiece, but I had fun making it and that counts too.
Okay, that is one commitment down, now there are only 7 or so more to be done.

Shibori

Today I show you some of the fabrics I dyed while I attended the Shibori Symposium in Minneapolis last month. All of these pieces are arashi shibori, each one has its own twist to it.

This piece was made by using a stitching tube of fabric. The stitching line was about 3"away from the edge of the fabric. After the fabric was pushed this down over a 4" pole these 'flaps' were dyed solidly while the other part of the fabric got the shibori pattern as it was crunched down.

The purple fabric also started out as a stitched tube. In this case the tube was much larger than the pole (1,5") required. This extra fabric was pleated while the tube around the pole was wrapped with cotton thread. The pleats got less dye than the other parts of the fabric creating this leave type of shapes on the final piece.

Instead of a pole you can also do arashi shibori over a thick rope. For this piece I used a rope about 0,5"-0,75" thick. The rope has its own pattern contrary to a pvc pipe and this shows in the final result. The dry fabric was wrapped diagonally over the rope with a cotton thread, pushed down and tied at the edges.

This fabric is the result of multiple layers of shibori. It started as a stitched tube pushed down over a 4" pvc tube. This was dyed blue. As you can see the stripes run horizontally. Before I continued with the second dye bath I first removed the stitching which had formed the tube. The second layer was created by first folding the fabric. The left part was closest to the pvc tube. You can see that the color there is lighter than at the right side. This time I wrapped the fabric diagonally across the 4" pole using a cotton thread and pushed it down. In this sample the second dye bath was green. By using 2 colors of dye it is easier to see how the fabric was created.

More pictures of different variations will come later.

nested round robin

Yesterday I was writing a list of the quilt commitments I have for the coming months and I ended up with a total of 8. That is the reason that you will see a range of different quilts as I am working on several at the same time.
This is a picture of the nested round robin we are doing with my dyeing group. Nested in this case means that the top does not leave my house. Every month we get a notice saying the colors which have to be used and the technique. Because of my vacation I still had to do June so I worked on both months tasks today. For the June row we had to use triangles in monochromatic colors while white/grey/black could be added. I had only dyed one medium value colorwheel and as I had no idea what dye powders I had used, I had to change the rules a bit. As color for the row I picked black and I fused random cut triangles on top of it. For July the challenge was to use a twisted ribbon with split complementary colors. I could have chosen to do a traditional twisted ribbon block, but I like to work more freestyle so that was not an option for me. I cut two ribbons out of fabric and fused them on top of the background fabric. On purpose I placed this twisted ribbon in only one corner. Size of the quilt till now is 18"x18".

Start + Minnesota quilt

As I mentioned in my previous posting I started working on my Start quiltlet. The background is now pieced as you can see in this picture. The quilt is now a sandwich (I used my favourite Fusible Hobbs) and is ready to be quilted.

When I was in Minnesota my friend Kelly suggested that we should make a quilt to memorate this holiday. And as we are both always in for a challenge we decided that we would start with one piece, divide this into two and both of us would continue working on it after the holiday. The pictures you see here are the beginning steps. Background fabric is a piece of fabric which we rust dyed. The Starbuck symbol (we both love their coffee and frappucino) was made from a darkgreen batik - I bought lots of batiks when I was there - , covered with gauze and fused with Misty Fuse to the background fabric.


The next step was a drastic one :-). With a rotary cutter Kelly divided the quilt into two pieces and this is how the quilt looks now. We both have samples of the different types of fabric dyeing/painting we did which will be added and some other additions. Size of the quilt before cutting was approximately 16"x16". How big the results will be is not yet known, but I will keep you posted.

A-texere

As some of you might know I participated in the Quilten Speciaal course. We had our last meeting/lesson some months ago and we all decided that we would continue as a group. And with a group a name has to be chosen. This took quiet some time, but at last the majority decided on A-texere. The A stands for Art and texere stands for textile.
In September we will have our first meeting and to start this group we all will make a small quiltlet (20"x20") with the theme Start. On this quiltlet the color turquois has to be used. This theme has been whirling in my mind for some weeks but I could not really get an interesting idea to continue working on, but yesterday I got the idea. Like switching on a lightbulb :-). I am now making a pieced background in black/white fabric (mainly black with a little bit of white). When this is finished I will start knitting something using turquois wool and attach this onto the quilt. No pictures yet to show.
Normal knitting needles are too long, but browsing ebay I found some bamboo knitting needles which are only 7,5" long.

blue printing

My holiday is over and it took some time to get back to 'normal' life, but hopefully I will be able to post several times a week from now on. The pictures I show you today are of the blueprinting Kelly and I did. It is a variation on sunprinting for which we used special fabric. On this site you can read more about it - and order the fabric if you are interested. Another name for this technique is cyanotype printing.
For these pictures cheesecloth was placed on top of the fabric and kept in place with pins. Unfortunately there was some wind so the cheesecloth did not stay in position, but I like the effect it gives.

And as we still had the foam leaves we also used them for some pieces. We used the different leaves we had on different pieces of fabric. If you take a close look, you will notice that the finished picture is from another leave than the picture which was taken at the beginning of the blueprinting proces :-) But you get an idea of it anyway.

The fabric we used was about a year old but the effects are still good. I like this technique only I don't know whether I will do it more often as the special treated fabric is not cheap. I know that it is possible to prepare the fabric yourself, but I do not know how much of a hassle that is.

symposium and other things

Keeping up with a blog while being away on holiday is almost impossible. I will post more pictures when I am back home again, but for the moment this is what I have to show:

The first picture is of a sunprint for the pillowcases. I used the foam templates of the Monstera leaves for this as well. The next 2 pictures are of blueprinting. This is a variation of sunprinting, but the fabric is pretreated with chemicals and is green when you start. On this piece of fabric 2 pieces of cheesecloth were placed and it was exposed to the sun for about 15 minutes. After rinsing the fabric the blue color of the fabric shows as you can see on the picture at the right.

Between June 4th and June 10th I attended the shibori symposium at Minneapolis. I have more pictures of this, but they need to be sorted out first. On the picture at the left you can see some of the samples I made during the workshops. I have done several styples of shibori before, so the most interesting part of the workshops was when the experimenting started and we learned different variations to the techeniques, like pleating the fabric before pushing it down over the pole. The picture at the right is a stitched shibori (size about 20" x 44") dyed with indigo.

I don't think I will have time to post more the coming days. When I am back home I will have my normal 3 to 4 postings a week again.

Keeping up a blog while being on holiday is almost impossible.