digitalis quilt

Today I had time to continue working on my digitalis quilt. I added the batting and the batting to the top. Then I picked up my rotary cutter and cut free hand style curved lines instead of the normal straight borders. Borders are attached and leaves are fused to the top. I had to do it in this order, because part of the leaves fall over the border as you can see on the picture. This was done on the first part of the triptych. Tomorrow I will satinstich all the leaves on this one and continue working on the other parts.

scarf + Fabled Fibers

This is a silk scarf I got from Kathy (http://pages.prodigy.net/klukens/index.html) which I dyed yesterday. I used ProChem's Ice Blue for it and because of the nature of the scarf some areas are lighter and others are darker. I am very pleased with the result.

This morning I received an email from Ann Flaherty. She is the organizer of the Fabled Fibers show in Houston where one of my quilts is hanging. Some of the quilts are chosen for coming year's calender and some are chosen for note cards. My Princess Moonbeam will be printed on note cards. So if you want to own one or want to see more of it, here is the link: http://www.fabledfibers.com/shop.html

fabric

As promised here are some pictures of fabric I created last week. For the fabric shown above I used presist and a wrapping of cookies or chocolate. In total I used 3 layers of presist. After each layer of presist was dry I painted the fabric with procion dye in different blue/greenish colors.



This picture shows the result of 3 layers of cold wax. I started with a pink fabric on which I splattered cold wax and some brushstrokes. When the cold wax was dry, I painted the fabric with procion dye. This process was repeated 3 times.



For this fabric I placed rubber bands on the table. Positioned the fabric over them and applied thickened procion dyes using a foamroller.

More pictures will come later.

this and that

I have not written much on my blog lately. The reason for this is that I had classes with Carol Soderlund (http://www.carolsoderlund.com). During the workshops we worked on precision dyeing (I now can dye more than 1400 different colors!) and other techniques like resist, overdyeing monoprinting and shibori.
One of the other students was SarahAnn Smith (http://www.sarahannsmith.com). It was especially nice to meet Sarah as we both have a quilt in the Fabled Fibers challenge (http://www.fabledfibers.com) which can be seen in the Fall 2007 Quilt Festival in Houston.
I will post some pictures of recent dyed fabric tomorrow. I intended to do that today but I have to recharge the cells for the camera first.

blueprinting

Yesterday my friend Kelly and I played with a - for us - new type of printing technique. We used lightsensitive fabric on top of a piece of board, pinned a number of foamy fishes and milkbottle collars on it and placed the board into the sunshine. The fabric was light green before we started working on it and after half an hour it had turned into a olive kind of green. It did not look at all as the instruction manual said it should. After rinsing the fabric luckily it got the color it is supposed to have. The picture at the left shows how it looked before it was placed into the sunshine. The picture at the right shows the final result. Does it not look gorgeous? It is definately a technique/material which I will use more often in the future.
For any one who is interested in this technique, on www.blueprintsonfabric.com you can read more about it. They are also the ones who sell this special type of fabric.

this and that

No pictures today. The last couple of days I have not been able to do much with fabric or dyes. I made 2 blocks with the black and white strata's I showed on previous posting but that is all.
Further I started to experiment a bit with needlefelting. I am a member of a journalquiltgroup. In this group we make a journal quilt every month. What I am felting at the moment I want to use for coming months journal quilt. But this sample is still in an early stage.

black and white

This is the beginning of a new black and white quilt. Not much to be seen yet :-). I had so much fabric remaining after the nyb that I decided to make another quilt in these colors. For this one I am using the strippiecing technique which Louisa Smith describes in her book "Strips 'n curves". The fabric is cut into 1,5" strips which are sewed together. The template is than put onto this new created fabric and cut out. The templates are sewed together into blocks and there is the quilt. Okay, it takes a bit more time than this explanation, but in short that is how the quilt is made. The templates I will be using are a variation on the drunkards' path. Some of them will be made from black fabric, others from white and again others from a combination of both.