The Painted Quilt

At the moment I am reading "The Painted Quilt" by Linda and Laura Kemshall. I bought this book some time ago so its now time to use it. This is one of the exercises I have  tried  out in my sketch book. Using paper on the right I have tried to create the image on the left. This was good fun and although I did not have a lot of paper to hand I used whatever I could find.
This book covers a lot of different technics that I intend to use on my hand dyed fabrics. I would definitely recommend this book and also visit their web site to see Design Matters TV.

Dyeing Workshop

Here are my fabrics laid out in colour  value.




This is the piece I used to mop up all the spills and clean the jars with. I think it turned out very interesting. and the lightest as it was not saturated with dye.






This is the darkest fabric. We used the plastic bag method, which is probably the best for a workshop situation.

This peice was folded and as you can see I achieved a move controlled design.



The next piece was also twisted to obtain a tie dyed effect.

This is a medium fabric, you can

 see here how the colours (yellow and blue) to create flashes of green.

Dyeing Workshop

On Saturday I took part in the Dyeing workshop in Galway at the IPS. Nikki Foley showed us how to dye our fabric with the use of plastic bags. We took our fabric home to wash and dry the next day. Here is my collection. I really liked the pieces that I folded or twisted and tied. I'm looking forward to using the fabric in my next project. 

Fauna and Flora

Here is the piece I'm working on for the IPS Western Branch Challenge. I have used this piece to practice my free motion quilting. I fused the animal squares on with bondaweb. 

Layers

The background on this piece is black felt. I have layered pieces of shiny fabric on top using bonda web  and stitched ribbon. The silver and light blue pipe cleaners were hand stitched down in  spiral shapes. The dark blue furry shape is also a pipe cleaner. I used a clover heart shape maker to create the cream puff.

Books on my wish list.

  I found this book on Amazon, I think it looks really interesting so I've added it to my wishlist. 

Gone But Not Forgotten

At a meeting of the Castle Quilters my friend Mona brought in a bag full of bits and pieces, which was given to her by the husband of her friend who had passed away. She said these things had reminded her of me. When she emptied the bag on the table I was amazed at the collection of samples which her friend had been working on. She had put some into plastic covers inside a folder, just as I do. But as I looked at all the pieces, I thought to myself why had she not taken notes to say what she had done and what result she had been trying to achieve. I then realised that I do exactly the same thing. Mona very kindly allowed me to take the bag home to look at some more. I took some coloured card stock and put it behind some of the pieces and photographed them. It also made me think about all the things I have experimented with and what will happen to them. I have been looking at sketch books with a possibility of using my pieces as covers or even pages within and maybe my girls would hold on to my pieces as mementos. I will post some more photo's of Mona's friend's pieces and find out a little more about her.