penny-studionotes-2

In the last two months, I've spent a lot of time in my basement wet studio, dyeing many gradations of different grays.  After the first set of gradations, which went from dark gray to very light, I found myself especially drawn to the very lightest of values.  (The photo above shows scraps from the fabrics that were eventually cut into blocks.)  So, already having narrowed from a palette of neutral stone colors to gray, I found myself narrowing it further to very pale grays.  This inclination of my eye and heart led me to an understanding/decision about the aspect of the subject--stones--that I was moving into:  the quality of holiness.  The original commitment to stones as a subject goes back to the experience of the Jewish practice of leaving small stones on a grave.  I've thought about why one would leave a token of a visit, and why stones serve so well as such a token.  I've been drawing stone shapes for many years now, thinking that the beaut...

My first blog post on stones was written in April 2009 , so I've been thinking about this subject matter for a long time now, and have tried out a variety of approaches with small-scale tests.  But I haven't yet found the method/composition to settle on for a large-scale project.  Back in September, I thought through directions I could go, and came up with eight possibilities, and am especially eager to explore two or three of them.  Now that Accident II is finished, I'm able to give full attention to developing these projects.  For any of them I will need a large supply of fabric dyed in appropriate colors.  Here's my supply of neutral-colored hand-dyes, as of January 2014, when I did a systematic dyeing of gray, taupe, tan, and cream, described in this post . I'm especially interested in using gray, and I don't have enough range of hue.  I did some dyeing last week to explore other grays.  In the photo below, the top row is a color recipe that came o...

I think Accident II is finished; recap of previous steps here .  Final size: 57x91. I overdyed the right edge so that there is color out to the edge all around.  I layered the top on a plain black backing, no batting, the two layers sewn right sides together and then turned for a plain edge.  I had planned to do simple stitching throughout, a running stitch following the diagonal line of the image, changing thread colors to blend with each area.  I was looking forward to having the piece on my lap for the months it would take to do the stitching.  But the more I look at the piece up on my design wall, the more I feel it's complete as it is.  I've long had it in mind that this piece is a kind of banner, and I think free-flowing cloth is more appropriate to that.  Stitching would interrupt the flow of the words and of the cloth.  I may do some stitching on a smaller trial piece I have from earlier stages, to see if the decision sticks.  Comment...

I've had time to work on some small projects while I wait for two successive overdyeing stints on Accident-2.  I saw the photo below of fan-shaped placemats on the GE Design blog --a great shape for the round table we have in our kitchen.   There weren't instructions in the post, but I figured out a pattern and method, starting from some wedges of Marcia Derse fabric that I had leftover from a tablerunner: I had some mottled hand-dyed fabric on hand that worked really well for the binding. I liked these two placemats quite a bit, but didn't have enough Marcia Derse fabric for more, and I need four placemats for the table.  I had some Daiwabo fabric leftover from another project, and decided to use that for four more placemats.  I also re-sized the wedges so that there are ten in each placemat rather than seven.  I didn't have enough dark fabric for all the bindings, which is why two are done with light fabric.  Might have been better with all four done in t...

I'm easing myself back into the studio, playing with scraps of color for a baby quilt.  I'm working from this pattern from American Patchwork & Quilting .  Who wouldn't like a reminder of the pleasure of a new box of crayons? American Patchwork & Quilting, Supplement to an issue sometime in the last year--sorry, no date given on the pages The pattern calls for piecing together 2.5" strips of assorted fabrics, but I wanted to use the variety in my scraps, some of which weren't that wide.  I think the results look fine.  I kept the crayons the size in the pattern (cut at 5" x 40", plus the crayon tip cut at 5"), but made just six and turned them vertical, to make a smaller quilt.  I haven't sewn the crayons together yet.  Here they are in rainbow order:  Not sure I like the red and orange next to each other.  Here I've moved the red over to the right side: But I think I like it even better this way:  primaries (red/yellow/blue) on the l...

I generally limit this blog to posts about my work in the studio, but it's a convenient place to archive some photos and reflections on a recent trip to the Grand Canyon.  Feel free to stop reading here if you're not interested! Twenty years ago, David, Jeremy, and I went on a 4-day white-water rafting trip on the Lower Salmon River in Idaho.  We really enjoyed the trip, and were very impressed with O.A.R.S, the company that ran it.  The guides recommended that we think about doing their trip down the Grand Canyon some day--the ultimate in river trips.  It's been in the back of our minds ever since, but we never got around to it.   Then a couple of years ago, we thought of taking a trip to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary plus our retirements.  Our first thought was to go to Paris, a favorite place of ours since the mid-1970s when we did dissertation research there.  But then we thought of the Grand Canyon.  Paris we could do even if we had ...

Starting in May of this year, the main project I worked on was Accident 2, still in progress.  On a large, difficult piece like this, I need smaller projects to give me occasional relief, and there were also stretches where I was waiting for a dyed piece to batch for a week or two when I could turn to other things.  This post will give you a glimpse of the variety of other things I've worked on this summer. I needed bandanas for myself and some friends going on a camping trip, so I decided to dye some of the ready-made bandana blanks sold by Dharma Trading Company.  I really liked six out of these seven, and dyed several others after this as well.  (Double-click on any photo to enlarge it.) I used two different thermofax screens (done from photos of tree bark) to see if I could print on a T-shirt.  Came out quite nicely, although I like the back (blue/black) better than the front (red/black) I made a few baby quilts, starting with a Cobblestones quilt from Kevin...