penny-studionotes-2

Last weekend, I had some friends over for an evening of dyeing fabric, in preparation for which I mixed up quite a lot of dye in advance, way more than we had time to use.  Having this much dye on hand, and wanting to make use of it while the colors remain true (which gives me about 2-3 weeks), I've been motivated to do some experimenting with using multiple colors on folded fabric, something I've not done much of, as I use mostly solids and close-to-solids in my quilting.  But I thought of a good use for this other sort of dyeing--I can use the whole piece (about 42" square) for the back of a baby quilt.  Or, I can more simply just back the fabric with some flannel and make it into a receiving blanket . The fabric at the top of the page is my favorite.  The fabric was pushed into parallel folds, and then I manipulated the resulting "rope" into double-S.  The red, purple, and blue dye then ended up being at 90-degrees to the lines of the folds.  Adding blac...

I'm very happy with this quilt!  The fabric is all hand-dyed by me (dyeing discussed here ).  The pattern is "Union Station" by Janine Burke, published in Colorful Quilts , by Amy Walsh and Janine Burke.  The back is one large piece of hand-dyed fabric. Here's a close-up of the quilting.  I chose a dark charcoal thread; I like how the design disappears in the black stripes. I came up with the quilting pattern, a meander with mostly sharp corners but some curves thrown in.  My sample is on the left below (beige fabric).  I gave this sample to Mary Walck , my go-to long-arm quilter.  She did a great job with the quilting, but it's also interesting to me that even while she was following my design, it has her own "signature"--quilting is like hand-writing that way. For the binding, I did a machine-stitched binding, sewn first onto the back and then flipped to the front.  I used a " faux-piped binding " method that involves piecing two binding stri...

The wet studio (for dyeing/painting/printing fabric) is definitely not as pleasant an environment as the sewing studio upstairs.  Nonetheless, I'm lucky to have a basement with plenty of space, a concrete floor, convenient electricity, and a large, deep double sink.  This is the main table I work on, here covered with an array of stuff I've been accumulating since starting to take classes on screen printing, stamping, discharge, etc.  Working further with the new techniques was being hampered by the difficulty of finding what I needed, so it was time to get organized.  I laid it all out on the table, and then organized things in plastic or cardboard containers.  Multi-use tools that could be used for more than one technique (like cotton twine and sponges) got their own box.  Here are a couple of the newly organized shelves: And on another shelf, I have most of what I need for regular dyeing and painting. The plastic shelving is from Walmart --much easier to...