Time to get (a little bit) serious

Eeek! The Kress Gallery show has been expanded to two months this year - August and September. Which means I need to get very busy getting my new piece together. This is a design I began developing in a Caryl Bryer Fallert workshop a few years ago. I learned a ton about coming up with and developing abstract designs, in addition to the skills necessary to actually put them together. Monday I started cutting and sewing. It felt REALLY good to get absorbed in the process again.

Lucky Lucky Me...

I'm the happy happy happy owner of this beautiful quilt:



My excellent wonderful talented friend Julie Huffman made it for a challenge/lovely gift for me! I was so surprised and happy, I think I spent about an hour petting it when it first arrived. The colors! The circles! The quilting and the beads! The awesome friend who made me a beautiful quilt!

More about mottling

The excellent mottling effect I've been getting with my fabric dyeing experiments is mostly a product of laziness. I like to use the simplest methods possible. The basics of the mottling are: squish as much fabric as possible into as little dye solution as possible in a fairly small space. I've been using generous fat quarters in a 1/2 cup of dye in small tupperware containers from the dollar store. As you can see from the photo, there's nothing scientific about the mottling. I just smoosh the fabric down into the dye and then leave it alone for 3 hours. No stirring. I use the methods in Dyeing to Quilt Quick Direct Dye Methods for Quilt Makers by Joyce Mori and Cynthia Myerberg.



Here's my batch of yellows. I did squish the fabric around a bit about halfway through the dyeing with this batch, so there's still mottling, but it's not as extreme as the earlier batches.



Here's Pistol pretending he's the mighty king of the savannah.

Good Luck Ash-O-Lee!

Just want to say hey to AshLee, who's finishing up her freshman year at the University of Idaho by flying down to Fresno today for conference track championships. I'm so proud of her hard work this year and I hope she has a great time down in Cali. Run Fast!

Thank you so much to everyone who's commented on the lovely mottled fabrics. I'll write more about that soon - I've been having the Dreaded Computer Problems.