DellaJane DyeCloth!

I dye fabric in my kitchen. To protect counter tops and cabinets, I cover *everything* with PFD (Prepared For Dyeing) fabric. The fabrics absorbs the inevitable drips and spills, and at the end of a dyeing day, are allowed to dry, then set aside for the next dyeing session. Fabrics are used repeatedly, accumulating an assortment of colors. The first photo shows a layering of color in DyeCloth 11-10B created over at least 5 dyeing sessions. When a fabric has enough color, it gets a soda ash bath and becomes a DellaJane DyeCloth.



I love the warm colors seen in a different part of DyeCloth 11-10B. Although all my fabric is for sale on DellaJane Hand Dyes , this piece may go into an applique project of my own!




Typically, I add leftover dye to the fabric to eliminate white space and blend the spots and drops and drips. DyeCloth 11-10A is just 35" long and, as it typical of smaller pieces, tends to get dropped into the dye bath sooner than larger pieces. Because they have less "random dye", they often have the typical look of hand dyes (lots of texture, lines and color veining). This piece has a wonderful green/yellow-green background, which does not photograph well!






I cut fabric to lengths between 2 and 3 yards when I plan to use it as a DyeCloth. Some of these pieces were cut to protect tables at workshops, so they are closer to 3 years long. These larger pieces are used for a long time. When I finally add left-over dye, the result can be wonderful serendipitous texture, such as the stripes in DyeCloth 11-10D. This piece, which is 98" long, has a large variety of color and texture over the length.








Not all DyeCloths are created equal! If I don't like the colors or look of a piece, it will get overdyed. This piece will definitely go back into the dyeing rotation. I'm not happy with the light areas - they are sort of blah grey - so another dye bath should help!




And there is always the piece which doesn't photograph well. DyeCloth 11-10C is mostly soft colors, fading and blending together.



Special offer for blog readers! Buy any of these DyeCloths and let me know you read my blog in "Note To Seller" at checkout. I'll refund 20% of your purchase price!

Student Quilts

It's always fun to see quilters use fabric they have dyed in one of my workshops. These two quilts were in the Omaha Quilters Guild Show last week.

Illuminated Inspirations (22" x 36"), was made by Joan Duggan. It was made from 1.5 yards of hand dyed fabric. The sections are joined with knitted strips and embellished with beads.











Primary Colors (33" x 40"), was made by Joyce Swift. She got the idea for this quilt from 2nd graders at Ackerman Elementary who were learning about warm and cool colors.

The Auction Bag

I was asked to be part of a Celebrity Fundraising Auction to be held during Quilt Nebraska 2009. Following my mother's advice (don't talk so much!) I didn't tell Katy that I wasn't a celebrity! I just agreed to make an item for the auction.

Taa Daa! This is a version of my 1-Hour Shopping Tote, made using a technique I call Too Small To Keep, Too Big To Throw Away. The outside of the bag is made using a 12-step colorwheel of fabrics. It is lined with rusted fabric. It took me a little bit more than an hour, but the result is worth the time spent!

Jim Jaworski, an artist from Las Cruces, New Mexico, gave me a walnut needle case to go along with the bag. Jim makes beautiful needle cases using a variety of woods. No picture - I sent it off for the auction without thinking about a photo. If you are interested in buying one, Email Jim. They would be a great gift for a quilting friend!

Prom Dresses - Color and Bling!

Prom dress shopping - not the most anticipated event on my calendar! Find something DD likes (minimal pouf), in a Mom-approved style (not too revealing) and an acceptable price range before my shopping clock strikes midnight and I run screaming from the store. We went to Black Tie, White Satin in Fremont, Nebraska. The Prom Loft (400 dresses!) was full of color! A rack of 7 orange dresses, each a different shade caught my eye & had me returning over and over. None of them fit our criteria, but the colors were beautiful! Another collection with colors ranging from pink to magenta to almost purple were wonderful as well. Animal prints were big, but tiger stripes in any color combination say the opposite of "Prom Dress" to me! The acid green dresses were beautiful, but not right for DD's skin tones.

The black dresses are always my favorites. Start simply and jazz it up! I love the way the designers use bling to create their designs of repetitive straight lines, wavy lines and organic waves. Without my camera, I could only sketch. Wanting more color, I picked up several booklets of photos, which resulted in this collage:



P.S. We were the only one of the 3 mother-daughter pairs to decide on a dress. It is ordered - now to find gold shoes.....

Gradations Workshop A Success!

Yesterday, I taught a workshop for the Omaha Quilters Guild . The best classroom space (for dyeing) I have EVERY been in is the art room at St. Mary's College! I'm always a little surprised that I enjoy the experience of teaching. There is a HUGE difference between quilting workshops and middle-school classrooms!



My students dyed three 6-shade gradations, one yellow, one blue, one red. Each gradation was dyed using a different method, giving them both some beautiful fabric and several dyeing options for later use.


My wonderful, enthusiastic students:

See more pictures on Flickr.


Next Saturday, I'm teaching another workshop - Direct Dye Application. I'm looking forward to a day of PLAYTIME! I've dyed some samples, but still have to put fabric packs together, review my supply list, and prepare handouts.

Overdyed Skirt

While I was in Houston for Festival last year, Christine T. stopped by and asked if I could overdye a summer skirt. It was light blue, with a light stain which made it unwearable. She wanted it gray with hints of purple, then picked a piece of fabric from a scrap bag that was more purple than gray. This is the result - I like it!

Chile Red Mini Cooper!

We decided on a car & bought a Mini Cooper S. It's really DH's car (I still need the behemoth Tahoe), but with Al out of town, I got to drive it today. Before I got off our street, before I shifted into 3rd gear, I wanted one of my own!

I've forgotten how much FUN it is to drive a little sports car! I love that the tach sits right in the middle of the steering wheel, while the speedometer is over in the middle of the dash. I love the way the engine sounds when I downshift. I love the responsiveness of the steering. I love how quickly the car responds to a slight pressure on the gas pedal.

In the Tahoe, I am invisible in an ocean of SUV's. Everyone looks at the bright red little car zipping by - teen-aged boys AND girls, teachers on outside school duty, other drivers, neighbors. Pretty please, can I have one too?

OMG!

DD is driving. Driving here, driving there, she likes driving everywhere!









We are shopping for a "new" vehicle. I saw this yummy raspberry truck today. Does the Ford Escape Hybrid come in this color?

New Bag for Spring!

I made this so-cute purse sample last week. The bag was designed by Ellie Grisham of Wisconsin. I love the over-dyed fabric on the outside, the spring colors, the knotted handle - everything about it! This is a fast & easy purse!

Color, Glorious Color!

I taught a variation of my Color Wheel Dyeing for the Omaha Quilt Guild last Saturday. It is so much fun to share my passion for dyeing with others! The group was enthusiastic and fun to work with - the kind of students that every teacher loves to have in the classroom!

My students dyed a 12-step color wheel, then had "playtime". Gorgeous fabric in plastic bags doesn't photograph well, so you get to see the playtime fabrics. Each student had 2 yards of fabric to dye, and there were as many ideas for dyeing them as there were students. A few pictures of the in-progress dyeing:

Wool Roving

I've been dyeing wool roving - sort of a bus man's holiday! These are the last five batches. I hang them in my kitchen window to dry. It adds a nice spot of color!

I've dyed wool with Kool Aid. Fun to do with kids, no toxic stuff to worry about, but a little on the expensive side if you want to dye any volume. I switched to MX dyes with vinegar as my acid after a few times playing around with Kool Aid. At first, I used the left-over dye from a fabric dyeing session, now I have to mix dyes just for wool!

There is an color shift when dyeing wool, so the results are less predictable than with cotton. This adds an element of surprise that I anticipate and appreciate. Back to the dyepot - I'm in a green and blue phase right now.

Dyeing Wool Yarn

I've recently been dyeing wool yarn with Procion dyes and vinegar. What I've discovered is that wool absorbs dye differently than cotton. When I'm dyeing cotton fabric, it is easy to get the textures and shades that make hand dyes so appealing. But that darn wool yarn soaks up the dye! Case in point: I poured blue dye in a dish, put my wet wool yarn on top of the dye, then poured on yellow dye. During the heating process, the blue dye absorbed into the yarn, mostly overwhelming the yellow. There are some bits of yellow left, but nothing like I anticipated.

This picture is from one of my students - these are her colorwheel fabrics:

Thanks Mary R!

Creating on a Colorful Scale

I find that most of my "creative" time is spent doing something related to business. While dyeing is creative, rewarding and completely enjoyable, more time is spent in marketing, accounting, and other non-fulfilling activities. Let me immediately irritate all those who find accounting fascinating by noting that those individuals whom engineers like myself more or less affectionately refer to as "bean counters" are the ones who coined the oxymoronic phrase "creative accounting".

So it was with great pleasure that I finished updating my business books and found myself with an entire Friday to spend in my studio. I've been designing a floral bouquet to show off the product of my Color Wheel Dyeing class. When I hit a snag in the design, I decided to take a break and make some postcards from the colorful scraps. These small scale creations allow me to a)thriftily use my scraps, b)actually finish a project and c)allow my sub-conscious mind to worry on the larger project's snag while keeping my conscious mind occupied.

I made four postcards. The first two will go to members of The Omaha Postcard Exchange.

Seaweed #1




Fractured Color Wheel #1





Fractured Color Wheel #2

This postcard will go to my sister as a belated birthday card. Happy Birthday, Natalie!





Fractured Color Wheel #3

My husband claimed this one for himself.

Why Use One Fabric When You Have Twenty?

When I make quilts, I like to work with many fabrics, rather than a few. Making these "scrap" quilts always generates SCRAPS! I saved the long skinny ones for string piecing. Most of the chunky scraps I threw away. But my hand-dyed fabric scraps were too precious to discard. When the scrap collection outgrew the first three storage boxes, each larger than the one before, I decided I had to start using them. I call the technique I've been exploring for about a year "Too Small To Keep - Too Big To Throw Away" (TSTK-TBTTA). These scraps fall into the 2-4" range. Bigger scraps are big enough to do something with, smaller scraps are a PITA to work with.

And yet, I found myself fusing these teeny scraps to a 4" x 6" Peltex postcard base. Scraps with fusible web on them, trimmed off a TSTK-TBTTA scrap. Scraps that are smaller than PITA-size scraps. Scraps so small that I normally don't even hesitate before tossing them into the trash. Scraps so small that they don't deserve to be called scraps! And I was using them.

My placement technique was simple - the scrap should cover Peltex, not other scraps. When I had the entire base covered with a jarring collection of color and shape, I "quilted" by sewing many straight lines at odd angles across the scraps.

Leftover from June's Journal Quilt were quite a few sort-of/almost triangular pieces of pink fabrics. These became the petals of my FireWorks Flower. I like how the flower quiets the explosion of color of the background. I'm not crazy about the dark gray chunks near the edges of the postcard, but I decided to think of them as the paper housing which gets blown away unnoticed when fireworks are set off.

This postcard will be mailed to the next person (Betty H) on my Omaha Postcard Exchange List.


The 2nd postcard is Blue Daisy. I finished the postcard, signed it, wrote the date as 2005 not once, but THREE times. Twice on the front, once on the back. If not for a daughter who pointed it out, I might never have caught my error. After four days of agonizing over my error, I mailed it to my June Postcard recipient without correction. My first ever late mailing :(

Dyeing Experiment du Jour

I dyed gradations today. Boring work. Not only do I dye the same color over & over again, but instead of getting the multiple shades and the wonderful textures that make hand dyed fabric so... well, so wonderful(!), I have to work to keep each length of fabric mostly the same shade. I know that beautiful quilts have been made using gradations. Quilts that are stunning & eye-catching. And those designs appeal to a huge group of quilters who want those gradations.

Personally, I would rather use two oranges and a yellow than a gradation. Or five different pinks plus a couple more pinks with hints of yellow & orange. But, since I'm dyeing this fabric to sell, I need to dye what my customers want, so I'm dyeing gradations. (FYI: I also dye & sell "for me" fabrics!)

I experimented with purple today. I *think* that it is going to be fabulous. It looks that way in the dye bath. I'm hoping the color holds through rinsing and drying, since both processes lighten the color. Fingers are crossed! That, however, was not my Experiment du Jour.

My experiment was done with the leftover purple dye. I've been wondering how the amount of water used affects the color, so today, I decided to find out. I measured two identical amounts of dye stock (3 T each). To one, I added water to get a very generous almost 2 cups of liquid. To the 2nd dye stock, I added water to give me a very scant 1 cup of liquid. I dyed two 1-yd lengths of Kona cotton. I added the dye to the fabric and manipulated both pieces quite a bit. I wanted to eliminate some of the shading & texture so I could see just color. My hypothesis is that I will get the same color in both lengths, but the fabric with more liquid will have more even color over the entire 1-yd length.

Tune in tomorrow for the results!

Pink! Orange! Yellow! and always - Black!

A beautiful day! I went shopping for something to wear to Caitlin's Confirmation. I absolutely LOVE Coldwater Creek. Having a brick & mortar store is so much more fun than catalog shopping! I bought a pink silk jacket (lined in a soft orange) that has wonderful (!!) threadwork in matching pink thread. I wish I could tell people I made this jacket. Throw in a black w/bright flowers skirt & a black tee & I'm set. I bought a second tee & a purse too. The pink purse called my name, but when it didn't match my awesome jacket, I went with my favorite - black.

I'm rinsing fabric that I dyed earlier this week today. Wonderful reds, rich oranges and strong yellows. Yummy!

The red at the back of this photo is my DyeCloth for that day. I threw the leftover dye on a cloth that was all kinds of "ugly" and got a yard of this wonderful red with very dark places fabric. A beautiful day!