dyeing and quilt camp

Quilt camp is in full swing, and we've had some fun show and tell already. Here's Karen with her hand dyed tank that she made after our dyeing workshop 10 days ago.

These are Kathy's fat quarters from the dyeing workshop. Kathy has spent two solid days making a floor-length red velvet cape for her daughter's wedding ensemble and hasn't played much with her quilt projects.

Karen's hand dyeing efforts

Kathy's and mine together for comparison

The back of my t-shirt quilt, in a checked theme

The front, with a pair of feet, since this quilt is all about running.

Karen with her dyed to match underwear, which she threw in the dye bath because she never wears the white ones anyway

A UFO one step further to completion--this was from my guild's challenge two years ago.

Val squeezed into a corner of my living room. We're packing them in here at quilt camp, but there's still room for more.

Mid-summer dyeing

My guild had a dyeing workshop last weekend, and I decided to overdye instead of making a set of gradiated fat quarters.

I threw in some vintage linen tablecloths and table runners, with mixed results. I like how the linen takes the dye, but sometimes the embroidery took the dye, and other times not. This is probably $3 worth of linen here from thrift shops, so I figured I didn't have much to lose. I'll keep the bigger indigo one intact, but I'll probably cut up the rest of the pieces.

I also overdyed some printed fabrics and some white on white, mostly from my recent shopping trip. The striped white on white is more interesting now, and the orange dotted one on the left is also a white on white print. Doubleclick to see the details.

Here's the blues and purples.  I like the white on white triangle print at the right.

Lovely colours on a summer evening.



Beautiful colours

I spent my birthday in the most fun way: my quilt guild went to my mom's studio, 90 minutes away from our city, for a dyeing workshop. Check out Laura's blog for more details on the process and her lovely results. Despite my mother being a hand dyer and teacher for 20 years, I had never done more than a few t-shirts (and a bit of yardage in purple), mostly because she is very generous with her fabrics. So this is my first attempt at dyeing the spectrum with Procion dyes, in the fall dark range of colours.

I'm generally happy with them, although there are more oranges than I expected, and the red isn't terribly red. But there are many variables in this process, and I did manipulate and twist the fabrics to get variations in the colour. I'm happy with the range of colour on a piece of fabric.
At the end of the workshop there was still dye and fabric left, so I folded half metre cuts of unbleached muslin and then put rubber bands on the folded bundle for some resist lines. Except for the yellow, these are from the summer line of dyes. I'm happy with this yardage in primaries, and I'm going to share them with my guild (under instructions from mom, although I'm tempted to keep them.)

And then we pushed the experiment once more, and overdyed some white on white yardage in purple and red. I love how that crochet look flower pops out. (I'm supposed to share these too. Come on, it was my birthday!)
After a lovely potluck lunch on the deck as well as two birthday cakes, we packed up and headed to a local quilt store, and then some of us saw Joyce's show on the last day. It was a great day in quiltland.