Curvelicious!

Since returning from NY and seeing the AQS Syracuse show, I have been wanting to play with my new "Gadget," a "Curvelicious" ruler. Well I guess it is not a ruler as it has no measurements on it, so let's call it an acrylic template. It is 24" long and barely fit diagonally in my suitcase, I was worried it would get snapped in half by the airlines. My main intention is to use it with my hand dyed fabrics. My hand dyed collection has been growing, and I am always looking for a new project to use them in. I like to have a project going with my vintage fabric collection too.

My hand dyed fabrics have outgrown the 3 boxes I had them in, so I took them all out and refolded and fondled them. Unfortunately most were fat quarters, and not long enough for the 24" template. My last batch however was long 1/3 yard strips, and worked just perfect, but I did not have the color assortment I wanted. I began by cutting 4" strips, since I could not find the instructions, didn't even bother looking. Well, really they should be the width of the template plus half the width on either side, with seam allowance I should have cut 7 1/2" strips. But the pattern looked good anyway, just that they were butted up next to each other, instead of having the negative space be the same as the template.

When it was demonstrated for me, she had fused the whole strip, but I did not want that much fusible, so I cut 1" strips and fused them to the spindle shapes. I use Pellon 805 "Wonder Under" for a fusible, but I went and got a new batch and it is DIFFERENT and not in a good way. Way too plasticy, it did not iron on as easily, and did not stick very well either. I am not a happy camper. But I've got 6 yards to use up, thankfully it was on sale.

Another thing with the template, is that you need the smallest rotary cutter, to cut the concave curves, even with that it was still snagging on the plastic, and being difficult to use, she had even cut the small decorative circles with the small cutter. But I used a plastic template, drew around the circle and cut them by hand.

My OCD had me cutting until I ran out of fabric, it made quiet a long set of strips. I had planned on doing 24" blocks and put them together in alternating directions, but it did not come out square, so I made it one long set of strips. It is too wide for a table runner, so I think it will go on the back of a door. I plan on working in a series with this template, so in my mind I have solved the problem of the alternating blocks. I also want to play with shadows, I have scraps that have a curvy side and a straight side, and lots more circles, and lots of other ways to use this template. Now to start quilting.
See you next Friday, on Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the badge in the right hand column to see what other very talented textile artists have been doing this week.

Blue & Gold Jacket

The last week and a half have been spent working on a jacket. I've been collecting royal blue and gold metallic fabric for some time now, with a jacket in mind. It started with a gorgeous piece of Jacquard woven Japanese fabric in deep blue and gold. This turned out to be a problem fabric, as it shredded on the seam lines and was made of polyester so it wanted to shrink or melt when touched with an iron. I got a jacket pattern last time I went to the coast, called "Butterfly Jacket" by Ricki Bremer. I think I just bought it because I liked the fabric the sample was made out of. Also the raglan sleeves interested me, because every jacket I've tried on lately has been too tight on the upper arms. The sizes went up to 3x, so I got the pattern. It began with a muslin foundation to piece the patchwork onto, I cut up a bit of my fabric into 7" wide strips. It called for squares, but I cut mine anywhere from 4" to 9" long, to give more variety to the design. These were sewn into rows and then flip and sewn onto the muslin for stability and shaping. The pattern looked HUGE. It did not have several sizes, only a 16 and a 3XL "Goddess size," and I fell some where in between, maybe "Princess" size. So measuring at the hip, I decided to take out about 8", 2" each on the front panels and 4" on the back piece. It went together fairly easily, it even had a lining and one of my fabrics was a 4 yard piece, just enough. Well it did not fit well, frowny face, It was still too big, but the main problem was the raglan sleeves, just TOO much fabric "pooching" out all over.

So, I was unhappy with my efforts and the fit, just a waste of time and GOOD fabric. Several solutions are available, I can cut it apart and slim down the raglan sleeves, or get a different pattern and cut it from the excess of fabric in the jacket. I think the pieces are big enough to just cut out new pattern pieces. So I sit and wait as I make up my mind, but I hate to waste all that wonderful fabric.

This is one of the reasons I don't sew clothes for myself, I've made skirts and blouses before, and several quilted vests, which I had to tweak the pattern to fit. But clothes sewing is NOT my forte. I am so glad I did not cut up my hand dyed silk noil for this jacket. or do any embellishing or beading. The blue was good fabric but it still was a trial run before I cut up the silk.
On Friday I will link this post to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the link in the right hand column to see what other very talented artists are doing.

Purple Frogs Under the Bridge

Several more Row by Row strips are finished. The Freemont St. Bridge in Portland, Oregon, has paper pieced trees on either side, and lots of fusible bias. The wider pieces were just ironed with a hem. Everything was held in place by lots of pins until I could get it fused down and then stitched. The difficult part was to keep the uprights, vertical and not wavy. This pattern came from A Common Thread. The Purple Frog Quilt Shop in Jefferson, Oregon, could only make a quilt with guess what? Purple frogs! Everyone wanted this pattern, the shop is near Salem, and just off of I-5.

The water lily and dragonfly is from Ruby Street Quilts in Tumwater, Washington. It is a paper pieced hexagon pattern. I love this pattern, I used a white with metallic gold spots for the flowers and a silver metallic with black net print for the dragonfly wings. The photo does not due the beautiful fabrics justice. I ran out of the backing fabric and had to steal some from the back of the applique on another row. I pieced little tiny pieces together to get enough fabric to finish the dragonfly block. The yellow duckies are from Greenbaum's Quilted Forest in Salem, the big bellied ducks are from a primitive painting that Sylvia has, and the duck crossing sign is near by. The Alaska style fish are made with a fusible laser cut pattern. Unfortunately I could not buy the kit, so I had to make my own. The Salmon and Orca were not too difficult to cut out with sharp pointed scissors, but the tiny fin pieces on the halibut took a while, and I simplified it by drawing fewer cuts. It also came out 6" longer, so I must have mixed up the measurements on the attic windows setting. I'll just remove the last border, and I think it will be ok. These are still fun to do, but I want something more creative to occupy my time.

I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the badge in the right hand column to see what other very talented textile artists are doing.

International Fairy Tale Challenge

My finished project for the International Fairy Tales Challenge, is titled "Social Climbing." 30 artists from the USA, France and Japan participated. One artists from each country were assigned a Fairy Tale, so there would be 3 versions of each tale. The quilts are all going to International Quilt Show in Tokyo in November, and then Quilt Week Yokohama. After being in Japan for a while, they will go to France for a year, then return to the US, for shows here. Our last challenge, "International Painters" has returned to the US and will be in all AQS shows in 2016.

I was rather uninspired for a long time. The tale is from Iceland "A Cottager and His Cat," the cottager's father dies and leaves him a lot of ill gotten money, a spirit tells him to throw all the money into the river, and take what he finds there. He throws it a way and finds 6 gold shillings. He buys a cat, rather unique to Iceland I gather. He takes the cat to the castle and it kills all the rats. The king is so happy, he lets the cottager marry his daughter. That is why it is titled "Social Climbing." See no trolls, fairies, dragons or anything special, just a man and his cat. I finally researched traditional Iceland costumes on Google. The women's outfits are elaborately embroidered, but the men's rather plain.

So I sketched out an Iceland winter scene, with the cottager and his cat going to the castle. I began with a printed sky fabric and a plain white on white hill of snow. I have lots of birch tree fabric from my time spent making landscapes. This style is right up my alley.

Traditional men's costumes are dark blue, black or green vests over a white shirts, with beautiful embroidery, but I kept my embroidery simple. I began by making the vest out of a heavy blue fabric that I had, maybe it is linen? I textured the sleeves with folds of muslin, and made a simple stand up collar.

The snow scene started to take shape, as I added the road in shades of gray, darker at the bottom. The birch trees on either side have snowy branched trees in the background, and snow filled pine trees scattered on the hill side. I had just bought the pine trees fabric from this years Christmas line, it has beautiful woodland animals on it, deer, fox, rabbits, birds and other. It was a shame to just cut it up for the pine trees.

I found the cat pattern that I wanted in a stained glass book. It is walking forward, but looking up at the castle.

The castle is finished in a brown stone blocks print. It looks like it is leaning, I fixed that before I quilted it.

All the elements are in place and ready for quilting. I used a flat cotton batting, I use so much thread painting/quilting that I did not need the puff of a polyester batting. I do a raw edge applique to quilt it all together, the pieces are in place with Avery glue stick. I tried the Elmers school glue stick that everyone had this "back to school" season and did not like it. For one it was purple and the color showed through on light colored fabrics, and it was too dry and stiff.

I use matching rayon thread for the outlining of each piece, going back and forth, so each edge has three layers of thread. One line of thread can miss the edge too often or get to far inside the edge, this gives a good solid line and keeps the eyelash fringe to a minimum. The hat was made from a knitted sweater sleeve from Goodwill. I used the ribbing first and then tucked in a long triangle for the hat. Traditionally they are long tailed and tipped with a gold or silver tube and a tassel. I used the silver tip from a bolo tie. I still have to make the tassel for the end of the hat.

It was an enjoyable process, once I had the idea in my head, and knew what I wanted to do. Having a deadline helped, I thought I had to have it for the beginning of October, but when I looked up the info it said Oct, 1. All this was done starting last Saturday through this Saturday. Then I read the info again, it said finish by the first and deliver by the 10th, whew, but I am glad I got it done. One of the other participants, will deliver it to the US coordinator in Eugene, Oregon this week, so I don't have to worry about that. I was going to go up today, but I still need to put on the tassel. I unraveled a bunch of yarn from the sweater but it is kinked from the knitting. I think I'll get it wet and see if it will relax a bit. Thank you for following along as I make haste for another deadline. I am very happy with the way it turned out and hope you like it too.

I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the badge in the right hand column to see what other talented textile artists are doing this week.

Dyeing Revealed

The dyeing project from last weekend is finished, with a wash in Synthrapol and dried and ironed. See last weeks post on the dyeing process. The first piece was ice dyed, wonderful colors and texture, the fabric is folded in half for the picture, so it is a larger yard and a half of fabric. The second piece is the one that was scrunched up on the wire rack. Rainbow color spots and lots of blending. This is a 2 yard piece.

The second piece of ice dyed fabric, shows the "Flower bloom" of the pattern as the fabric was pushed through the grid of the plastic basket. Crimson red, burgundy and purple dyes were added to the turquoise, navy, royal blue combo that was used in the first one.

Here are the results of the tub dyed "Parfait" layers. A different color dye was poured on top as each layer of fabric was put in the tub. The effect and cross color mixing was the result of scrunching the fabric and adding dye on top of dye.

Each of these pieces is a 1/3 yard strip, folded up to take the picture, there is a lot of patterning as the length unfolds. I still have some dyes left over, and got 8 more yards of white fabric at Joann Fabrics sale yesterday, as long as the weather holds nice and warm, I'll do a little bit more.

I am linking this up with Nina-Marie's "off the Wall Friday" click on the badge in the right hand column to see what other Very talented textile artists are doing.

Dyeing Hot

Since yesterday was 100 degrees out, and Saturday was going to be 95', I got an early start to my dyeing project. I had a bunch of liquid dyes leftover from the Fyber Cafe Dyeing workshop that I wanted to use up. My friend Peggy could not make it over, but I had already set up and had 3 yards of raw silk noil soaking in soda ash. It was in two 1 1/2 yard pieces, a soft beige color and a very nubby texture. I wanted to ice dye these pieces. Two plastic baskets from the dollar store with large open grids, were perfect to tuck the fabric into. Pushing the fabric into the grid gives a pucker where the dye drips down, creating a flower burst of colored texture. I used turquoise, navy, royal blue and black on both pieces, sprinkling the dry dye powder over the piled on ice. One piece I added bright green and just a little burgundy. The second basket I added burgundy, violet and some crimson sunset, all Procion MX dyes from Dharma. I clipped plastic bags over them to sit in the heat and batch.

My next project was to dye 5 yards of "Sew Essentials" white cotton from JoAnn's Fabrics. Cutting them into strips about 13" wide, would give me a 12 1/2" background block for applique, instead of just long quarter yards. Each large butter tub has scrunched up, soda soaked fabric. I put about a 1/8 cup of a dye we mixed for the workshop, I am not sure of the dye percentage to water, I think she said 12% for her wool dyeing. The 1/8 cup was not quiet enough to soak all the way through the fabric, and I added about a 1/4 cup of soda ash solution to it.

When I usually use this method of "Parfait" dyeing, I forget what three colors I used in each layer, so this time I took pictures of each step. First one layer of fabric and dye, then another scrunched fabric layer with dye, then a third layer. One tub had purple, fuchsia, and magenta, the next turquoise, royal blue and navy. The last tub had golden yellow, black, and scarlet. Two more tubs were set up, lemon yellow, magenta and purple, then green, turquoise and navy.

I covered each tub with a gallon zip lock bag to sit and batch over night,

Last was the remaining 2 yards of silk noil, after a soda ash soak, I bunched it up on my big wire rack, giving it a good scrunch.

I began to drip dye from the squeeze bottles onto the fabric, using ALL the colors I had.

More colors, more dye, I did not want any of the plain silk color to show. Because it was damp from the soda ash soak, the colors did run together and soak through.

But the dye did not soak thru enough, so I flipped it over and added more dye. Then a lesson I learned a long time ago, when using all the colors, was I did not like the pure rainbow colors blending to mud brown between the bright colors. So I picked it all up and gave it a good twist and scrunch to mix up the colors more. So there were fewer pure colors and more blending.

The finished bundle of silk, you can see it is not as bright as when I first started dripping on the colors. The day did get HOT, MX dyes only need to reach 70 degrees to heat set, and covered in plastic they were not in direct sun. I left them over night to batch set.

In the morning I brought them all in and rinsed out the excess dye that did not bond with the fibers. My 5 gallon bucket with the rinsed fabrics, the silk was quiet heavy and bulky. I put them all in the washing machine with some laundry soap and a couple of cap fulls of Synthrapol. Next the drier and the reveal.

I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the badge in the right hand column to see what other talented textile artist are doing.

Row by Row Continues

My row by row adventure continues, They are something I can do in little bits of time, and don't take much space. They finish quickly, just tracing the fusible, choosing fabric and then ironing it all together. I really like the Think Big one, the little fish with the shark fin on his back. They look like they need fins, I keep wanting to add them, but then I think they are goldfish crackers and the shape is just fine as it is. The sunset is really a beautiful orange at the top, with a deep purple with metallic gold in the center, I tried adjusting the color in Photoshop, but could not get it right. Those three are patterns I got on my trip to Seattle to see my sister. I went specifically at the time I would get past Portland about 10am when the shops were open. I hit Woodland, Kelso, Longview, Castle Rock, Centralia, & Tumwater. The shops were each individual, I liked Castle Rock the best, a cute little town with an old down town area. I had lunch at a little cafe, better than the McDonalds by the freeway exit. By that time I was hitting rush hour traffic in Tacoma/Seattle and did not dare get off the Interstate. I would never have made it back on. Of course I spent money in each shop, planning on sticking with the plan of only getting a few fat quarters, NOT!!! I had to have this and that, more water fabric for the Row by Row, more red fabric, just because, some "Glow-in-the-Dark" white Halloween fabric. If the owner had not mentioned the white fabric was glow in the dark, I would not have looked at it twice, much less bought any. While visiting my sister, we went to Monroe, Snohomish and Everett. I had a wonderful time, just hanging out with her. We went to the local farmers market, and lunch with my niece. I chose to drive home Saturday, less traffic, and instead got a torrential downpour, nasty nerve wracking driving. But the dedicated Quilter that I am, I stopped at two shops in Tacoma, getting lost trying to find the 3rd one, and found the one I missed in Olympia. Also Woodland, 'cause they weren't open when I went up. I braved Vancouver by getting off at the exit with the street name of one of the shops. But... the road went for miles and of course the shop was at the far end. The rain tapered off a bit by the time I hit Portland, so the rest of the drive was ok, but I did not get home til about 8pm. I collected a total of 13 Row by Row patterns. As one of the shop owners told me I was doing "FART" a Fabric Acquisition Road Trip. So now I have seen the East coast, Midwest and the Northwest, all in one summer. With only one day of vacation left to do laundry and get ready for the start of the school year. Back to school bus driving, my 24th year.
I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the badge in the right hand column to see what other talented textile artists are doing.