penny-studionotes-2

One of the printing techniques I learned in a workshop with Carol Soderlund last October was "deconstructed screen printing."  It's a way of preparing a silk screen with various textures and thickened dye so that you get multiple prints from the one screen, but the pattern printed changes as the screen "deconstructs." You can also pull through different colors of thickened dye to further vary the prints.  (I've put a few links at the bottom of the post for anyone who would like to learn more about this type of printing.) You can see the fabric as originally printed in this view of the wall with my work during the workshop.  the deconstructed piece is towards the center, right under my name, multiple prints going down a piece of fabric (click on photo to see this better): I think I added another layer of grey and tan dye on parts of the cloth.  Then I cut it all up into 3-1/2" squares and played around with them.  Below is an early arrangement, which I l...

I finished piecing the top of "Regret" back in March, described here , where you can see the whole composition.  It took me a long time to figure out what to do about the quilting.  My working plan was to do straight-line machine stitching, which I felt to be in keeping with the starkness of the image/message.  Here's a small maquette I did, quilted in this fashion. (Figures in the final version are placed slightly differently.) But I couldn't figure out what to do in the black figures, which I thought should be quilted differently from the background.  I was also considering parallel lines going in just one direction through the whole quilt, maybe diagonally.  I had considered hand-quilting, but didn't want the "softness" of look/feel one gets with hand-stitching.  And part of me felt, "I've been working on this quilt long enough.  I want to get it over with, and machine stitching will be so much quicker." Then I took Dorothy Caldwell'...

Some years ago, my mother knit this cotton bedspread for me.  She loved to knit, the more complicated the pattern the better.  I used the bedspread for some time, but eventually put it aside.  It is quite heavy, and difficult to manipulate on the bed.  But a few weeks ago, I decided I was tired of the quilt I had on the bed, and pulled this out, to see if I'd want to use it again. Alas, I discovered that there were a number of large holes in the spread, not just the stretched areas where blocks come together (easy to repair), but other places where the thread had unravelled within a block.  I must have washed the quilt with bleach, trying to remove a few small stains, one of which is visible towards the center of the photo.  The bleach not only didn't work on the stain, but I think it continued to eat away at the fabric.  Having done a little  discharge work using bleach, I now know how important it is to rinse the bleach out of the fabric with a...

I found a great way to use the multi-colored hand-dyed pieces that I did a week ago--I can use them for one side of a two-layer receiving blanket (other side is flannel).  I've made these before, but using commercial fabric for both sides.  See this post for a description of the blanket and why it makes a great baby gift.  It's also less time-consuming than making an actual quilt, and using the hand-dyed fabric will still give it a personal touch. Here are two more; all three of these were made with flannel that I had purchased to go with some commercial fabric I had on hand, but that's now back in my stash. The next one has some applique patches added, because the fabric (an inexpensive muslin) had some holes in it after the washout.  Here are instructions for the blanket--very simple! TWO-LAYER RECEIVING BLANKET Material :   1-1/4 yd flannel 1-1/4 yd cotton (not flannel)  1.        Prewash and dry the fabrics. 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...