You can’t just throw out extra dye, you have to use it… it’s an immutable law of nature. So I grabbed a yard of pure white PFD (Prepared for dyeing) fabric and a near-yard of lemon yellow fabric someone gave me, which I wanted to overdye as it was a plain old solid. Here’s how they looked to start:

Then I added dye…. yellow all over (a warm yellow) and let it set and soak for a while. Then I dribbled a blue on one long side and a red on the other long side and let them work their way towards the center. I placed two small pieces of cloth flat on the top, too, to wick up the color. After batching for a while, I poured off the excess dye and added the soda-ask-solution to “fix” the dye. I poured off the excess dye first because I didn’t want it to “float” and homogenize the color. Finally, I washed them out…. here they are in a synthrapol wash in the sink:

After rinsing and nearly drying, I ironed them up and put them up on the design wall… I’m in LOVE!

The fabric on the right is the one which was initially pale lemon yellow. The fabric on the left / underneath is the white fabric. From the difference in tone and shading, I’m guessing the yellow cloth wasn’t mercerized, as the colors aren’t quite as bright… I really like the subtle difference.

I liked them so much I decided I’d dye a dark purple (made from the same three primary dyes) and a pale colorwash version with more turquoise showing on the edge. There’s a quilt in this… I don’t know what or when, but it’s there…..

OH MY… they’re even BETTER ironed and stacked….and please ignore the stacking oops on that top stack….the dark one is obviously out of order!

Stacked and sorted, dark end of the piles showing….

Stacked and sorted, light side of the piles showing (the greens and browns are in the center of the piles).

Here’s what the piles look like before they are stacked:

Aren’t those colors heavenly…. now, where to find the money and time to buy 350+ yards of fabric, dye, auxiliaries and dye a yard of each…the make quilts!

If you want to learn how to dye like this, please don’t ask me, go to the source: Carol Soderlund. She’s a whiz a teaching and a whiz at dyeing…. a great combination! She is so good that folks literally travel from around the world to take classes from her… no one else teaches how to get consistent reproducible results like she does! In my two classes, I’ve had classmates from across the US, Australia, France, The Netherlands and France… the word has obviously spread!

Our Monday meeting in late January was a welcome respite from the chaos that is my life these days. So much so, that I headed out Route 1 south I found myself talking to myself with glee: “yipppeeee! Girls day out! Girls day away!” Ya think I needed the break? Yep.

The day started nicely, and I stopped at the Starbucks at Cook’s Corner en route to Hannah’s. I went in instead of through the drive-through (and found a gift for hubby for Valentine’s), and found this “art notebook” (above). The trees remind me a bit of Deborah, and I loved the inside (below). But I think I can make a nicer quality one…this was really neat, but I can make it even more fun (and all mine!). Still, I liked it enough to snap pics, and I really liked the embroidered detail on the flap covering the pencil points, which alas you can’t see because I lifted the flap for the photo—smack self upside head!

We met at Hannah’s house, where her youngest took a long nap (and the babysitter was there to boot!), we shared and talked and ate and played, pretty much in that order, except we also ate while sharing! Kath brought muffins and I brought juice (I have fallen in love with the Simply Orange, which tastes like fresh…and the jars are great for mixing dyes, too.) Kathy brought her being-quilted chickadee quilt which she has discussed over on her blog, here. I brought my in-progress Hawaiian style quilt that will be in my book (which will be delayed again as I deal with mom’s decline), and Hannah had these incredible delectables tucked away, but we found them anyway…. I am in LOVE with that tree piece (second photo)!

Hannah had a project she wanted us to try and even had all the supplies… she had seen on Martha how you cover a canvas with your own cloth, Mod Podge it to seal it and glue it to the canvas. Then you take a mask or a stencil and paint around a shape. Here’s Kate working on hers as Hannah starts on our Italian sub sandwiches for lunch:

Of course I couldn’t do what the instructions said…. I decided to tear strips of cloth and have a striped background….

And I was SO inspired by this flyer from the library in Brunswick (or was it the local film / cinema group? It was about movies)… aren’t these incredible graphics? I think I’ll tear masking tape to mask off trees and birds on my striped cloth one before I paint…. but what color? Deep navy? Teal? Silver? That last hadn’t occurred to me until I just typed it, but maybe that’s it…. or a dark metallic gray?

And then there was Kate’s rum cake for dessert….. *almost* needed to worry about a breathelyzer test after that one….grin! And, sigh, we missed Deborah, who always took photos of our feast…..

Hi all…. it has been a crazy week. My mom, who is 89, is not doing so well, so I’ve been trying to help her and care for her long distance (I’m in Maine and she’s in California). That means I may not be able to post as often for the next month or two, so if I appear to vanish, I’m OK…just swamped with life. It looks like everything is going to work out and that she will be able to move to Maine in a month or so. Keep your fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I have some glorious color to share with you! In the pursuit of perfect color for my art quilts, I’m engaged in a color-swatch-swap (try saying that three times fast! pphhhttt!) with Carol Soderlund and some fellow students. The 8 students were in Carol’s totally awesome dyeing workshops (I’ve blogged about them in the past) either this past October or in August 2007. We are in Australia, The Netherlands, Denmark, and across the US, and are each dyeing a different color family. I chose to use a warm yellow, a red  and a blue, and I may have one of the best color families known to procion MX dyers! The photo above is of the first round of dyeing . Here is the yellow after it got out of the dye buckets, washer and dryer:

Then, you add red:

Then turquoise:

Overall the values (light to darkness) are light… the “black” is really a deep eggplant… the colors of the fabrics in the dyebath was awesome. If I take the darker range and go deeper by having more dye powder per ounce of fabric, I can get some really intense blues…. the colors remind me of tropical fruits (citrus, papaya, mango), flowers (hibiscus and fuchsia and orchids), foliage (lush moist as well as arid climate plants) and the sea… from a stormy day to deep Caribbean ultramarine to those glorious aquas in the shallows….

I’ll add more pictures once everything is ironed and sorted by color range….. WOOOT!

Yes, I am alive. Yes, I have been working like a madwoman. Yes, family life happens (and means you don’t get to blog). Yes, I have been teaching. Yes, I have been quilting!

Earlier this week I came across a post on the quiltart list by Sonja Lee, and a link to her blog, Art Textilian, with her contribution to the World Beach Project. WOWIE ZOWIE! Instant inspiration! The Beach project is sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, and a collaboration with artist Sue Lawty. Immediately I wanted to participate, despite the bone-shattering cold this week

So on Friday at sunset when it was about 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus temps in Celcius) with a nice breeze blowing to make it feel chillier, Eli and I went to town to buy Pigwidgeon (the pug)  a birthday present (a new bed), go to the post office, and just before dark (well, as dark was happening at 5 pm) make our piece on the beach. The photo above is of the beach below the library and amphitheatre park. You can see the schooners wrapped for winter and the ice (yes, ice) on the beach at low tide at sunset.

I guess I didn’t read the instructions too well, because the project is supposed to be made of stone, and ours is made of mussel shells, a few rocks, and tumbled, broken bits of brick (so it is totally New England!). When I asked Eli at breakfast if he wanted to do this with me, he asked if we could make the yin and yang if we could find white and black stones, so of course I said yes. Well, he didn’t remember what it was called, but I knew he meant yin-yang. When we got to the beach, he decided red and blue of brick and mussels would be better.

Anyway, I don’t know if our project will make the V&A website since it isn’t exactly mostly rock, but we had fun anyway. It got so dark in the 20 minutes or so that we were freezing our fingertips (some of the shells were frozen to the sand and we had to scrabble to pry them loose!), so I had to photoshop / lighten this last picture so you can actually see both the harbor and our project.