penny-studionotes-2

For the last couple of weeks, I've been back working on "Shelter," constructing the bottom left corner. (Click here for a sketch of the quilt and notes on how the layers are being constructed.) The photo shows a lot of strata pinned in place (28"high and 34" wide). The challenges I'm finding are: 1) working in variations in line, avoiding too many parallel lines; 2) judging the right quantity and placement of light-valued pieces ( the largish shiny stripe in the upper right is not so bad in reality--it's satin that is catching the flash) ; 3) avoiding some pieces that sweep across the whole field. I thought I had fixed this last issue, but in adjusting something else, there it is again. A detail: Suggestions welcome!

I set aside a large block of time yesterday for my first dye project at home. Good thing I had another large block of time today, to compensate for the large error I made yesterday. Here were the steps I took, with the goal of dyeing several pieces of fabric that I could cut up for use in " Stonescapes ": 1) I dyed several pieces of fabric a pale gray with a full immersion method, with the intention of then doing a second low immersion dyeing to get various kinds of mottling with darker gray and brown. But when I washed out the dye, no color was left. As I reconstructed what I had done, I realized I'd made a catastrophic math error when mixing the dye, using way too much water (by a factor of 10). Since I was aiming for a pale color to begin with, this meant essentially no dye was used. Well, on to Plan B. 2) Not able to face up to another 1-1/2 hours of full immersion dyeing, I went on to the less time-consuming part: adding mottled color onto the still-white fabri...