penny-studionotes-2

I'm back home from a couple of days of mixed media workshops in Chicago. I did two workshops; the first was on Thermofax screen printing taught by Pokey Bolton , and the second was on soy wax batik with Melanie Testa . For the screen printing workshop, we were able to send an image in advance, so at the workshop we each had a personal screen to work with, as well as other screens that Pokey brought with her. I sent in an ink drawing: In my favorite piece, I printed it in two different directions, overlapping. Do double-click on these images for a much better view. The photo at the top of the entry is a detail of this wider piece. I like it. I may just mount it as is and put it on the wall. I like the process of printing quite a bit. One quilt I have in mind includes some repeated words/phrases. Printing might be a good way to get them onto fabric. And here are a few of the many small pieces I did in the batik workshop. The first was one of several I did to see if I could ...

Quilters are always on the search for the best iron. For regular sewing on the ironing board, I use a Black & Decker Digital Advantage and am happy with it. But if I'm ironing more than a small length or two of fabric, I turn on my Ironrite mangle ironer. It is a joy to use--both because it irons yardage quickly and beautifully (I can't imagine ironing dyed yardage without it) and because each time I sit at the machine, I think about my mother. My mother would wheel the machine into the kitchen when it was time to iron. She used it not only for sheets and tablecloths, but also for my father's shirts. She was delighted, though, when cotton/polyester blends eliminated the need for her to iron, and when she and my dad moved to a condo, the ironer was stored in the basement. She would have given it away, but I said I was interested in it. I wasn't a quilter then, but I like linen table cloths, and my mother and her sister had both given me all of theirs, as they...

Here are the results of a week of fabric dyeing, six separate sessions and about 40 half-yard pieces of fabric. I'm pleased with the results--both in the fabric created and in the figuring out of a personal routine for the process of dyeing. I've had enough success to feel confident about doing more, and I usually understand why one or another piece missed the mark. My main focus was to create fabric for a quilt version of a pastel piece I did a couple of years ago at a mixed-media workshop at Arrowmont (each rectangle is a 9x12 piece of pastel paper, covered with layers of pastel): (More on this workshop and other non-quilt work produced there in this post, on another blog I contribute to.) Here are the fabrics most likely to go into the quilted version, two different shots: I think I'm going to try one version using the fabric just as it is, and then another version in which I add painted layers to the rectangles, to get more variation in hue/value across each pie...

High on the list for this summer has been to get back to dyeing fabrics. As August rolled in, I knew I needed to get going on this, to take advantage of the hot weather while it's here. I reviewed my notes from Carol Soderlund's great workshop that I took in April of 2009, wrote up step-by-step notes for myself, and began. I'm starting out with colors that I'd like for a midwestern landscape quilt (a fabric version of an earlier piece I did with pastel on paper) and also to build up a supply of fabric in the palette for further Pine Grove quilts. The results from the first two days are above. The three greens on the right are all the same dye formula, but with different methods for the dyeing. Not all the colors turned out to be exactly what I was aiming for, but comparing them to the one-inch samples I was working from (sample book from the workshop), I can see that this is because of "misreading" the color from the small sample. Two pieces of the gre...