Not having children means that we don't' do a lot for Christmas but I do usually take the time to just take a few days "off". I don't blog and do want I want, not what's on my to do list. We did get invited to a friend's Christmas afternoon for a couple of fun hours and we spent Christmas morning on a lovely hike along the North Anna river. It was kind of a perfect day! ON the craft front, I've mostly been watching football and crocheting. I think I'll have my purple sweater ready for an update photo tomorrow. Meanwhile, I have dyed the last of the beach towels. They will be gifted this Saturday. These two are for Ella and Eli. I got the color assignments from their Mom. Sawyer and Lincoln wanted 3 color beach towels. I had to dye them in a way that the blue would not mix with the yellow and orange. My spirals do square off a bit and I think that's because of the way I tie them. I'll have to work on my tyeing technique for future dyes but I think the kids will be happy with these. I had one extra towel so I dyed it with splotchy blues. I love this one and will either keep it for myself or set it aside for a future gift. I still have the serger out from working on the postcards so I decided to start another donation project before I put it away. I'm going to make another big batch of surgery drain bags. With the serger and and production sewing methods, these can be done pretty quickly. I expect I'll have them done in early January. Then I'll make some pet beds before I get back to my normal sewing/quilting schedule.
I hope you had a great holiday weekend, even if you don't' celebrate Christmas. It's just a great time of year for rest and recharging. I have some work friends that I get together with each month and we've been getting together at least since I retired 13 years ago. Every Christmas I like to make gifts for them and this year I chose dyed beach towels. I get my beach towels from Dharma Trading. They dye beautifully and are very soft. I used to always dye beach towels in a spiral design but I'm kind of tired of that so this year I decided to do something more organic and, honestly, it took just as long! I love the effect and might order some more towels to do some for myself. I each of my friend to tell me their 2 favorite colors and that's the guidance I used for the colors. I delivered two of them last night and will deliver the others next week. I also dyed one for June. June works for Hanover County and she is the person who "manages" our group and she is the NICEST person in the world. She loves the color red because it's the color of her college sorority so I made her a red stripe beach towel. I have 4 more beach towels to dye for my SIL's grandkids and then I'll be all done with Christmas making. Chris and I don't exchange gifts but conveniently we are getting a new printer and new water filtration system for our "gifts" this year. Yesterday I also got 2 more veterans quilts loaded and one of them done. I hope to finish off this one this afternoon. After that I have one more pair and I'll be done for the rest of the year! I might get one of my big quilts loaded and started.
Today I'm going to do something that I've never done before, participate in a medical trial. It's for a blood test for cancer screening. It's already commercially available but they will have to have a pretty extensive trial to prove it works for insurance to cover the cost. All I have to do is give blood and I get the test for free and they follow me for 3 years. That's it. If you are interested you could probably find a trial near you. It's being done nationwide in the US and they are enrolling thousands of people over the age of 50. It's a very expensive test and this is an opportunity to get it free. It's also being run in the UK by the NHS. Here it is, all together! The papers are all removed and it's ready for quilting. I have not figured out how to quilt this yet so I'll take a week off to ponder it. There are areas in this quilt where I think there are probably 20 layers. Forget trying to sew through that, you would have to hammer a nail through it. I think my "quilting" will be very rudimentary for the purpose of stabilizing. Here's a close up of the eye area to give you an idea of how small some of the pieces are. My best tool for these blocks were these clips. I remember when they came out and thought they were just another trendy sewing notion that I did not need. I eventually bought some and, like everyone else, I now consider them a necessity. I got my mess cleaned up and all of the fabrics put away and I'm very ready to start some new easy projects. I need some new masculine birthday postcards so I pulled this fabric that was leftover from the Corona Cats quilt back. I can't wait to get them done and share them. They are hilarious. Today, during my normal dyeing schedule, I'll be dyeing some new sleeveless tshirts for myself. During last week's session I dyed 3 maternity tshirts and a baby onesie for my nephew's wife. She should have them by now. I hope she loves them and that they fit. If you want to dye some, I found the white shirts at Mother Bee maternity. It took 4 test tries but I finally nailed the ombre effect. The actual color of the shirt is brighter than in the photo. In other news, we cut down the Dogwood that I've been looking at outside my sewing room for over 20 years. It used to be full of spectacular pink blooms every Spring but it started dying off a couple of years ago. It was now time to add it to the woodpile for winter fires. I need to figure out what to put in it's place.
I think I should be over the hardest part of the Goldfinch quilt now. All of the fabrics are selected! This was not easy but it was kind of fun. I think you can imagine the mess I made all over my sewing room floor. In the end I identified 3 fabrics that I need to dye and I did that yesterday. Even though my dyeing day is today, I wanted these to be ready to start sewing tomorrow. While I was in the dye studio dyeing my own fabrics, I decided to play around a little. I'm going to dye some maternity tops for my nephew's wife and I want to do one in an ombre effect. I've never actually done real dip dyed ombre so I did a couple of experiments with a couple of tshirts. I was able to rig up this chain that worked great for keeping the shirt at specific levels. I'll show you how they turned out tomorrow.
The day that I was tying up all of the tshirts I noticed the rest of the stack of tea towels that I had been dyeing before. There were 16 towels left and I decided to dye all of them. Eight of them were tied and I just used whatever leftover dyes I had from the tshirts. There was no planning at all and I'm really happy with the results. I will absolutely tie dye more and almost wish I had tie dyed all 16 of the ones I had. But I decided to use the Color Magnet on the last 8 to make some more gift sets that weren't seasonal. Of all 16 the top one is my favorite of the bunch but I'm not unhappy with any of them. Here they are... These 2 are pretty spectacular too! This last one is pretty cool too.
Here are the 4 sets that I screen printed with Color Magnet. On a couple of them I did overall designs instead of just edge designs and I think they turned out nice. All of them were done quickly without a lot of thought. I delivered one set last night as a housewarming gift for my college roommate's Mom and some of the others are already designated for gifts but I'm keeping a couple of the tie dyes for myself! Before we get to the photos I want to answer 2 questions from yesterday. About the glass ornaments. I've been collecting them at least 20 years. I usually pick them up on vacations. Pretty much every tourist gift shop has blown glass ornaments. But another great source for them is Etsy. I've bought some of my most unique ones from Etsy. But before you go there, make a cup of coffee and get comfortable, you are going to be there a while! About tie dyeing shirts on commission. Sorry, I do not do that. Honestly, I don't really enjoy tie dyeing that much. I do it because the shirts make great gifts and people seem to love them. Heck, I like wearing them. I just don't love making them so I only do it when I'm in the mood. But if you want commission shirts I'd also point you to Etsy. There are tons of tie dyers there that do custom dyeing. Tie dyeing actually takes me a long time. I have a lot of angst about color selection and placement. I did get some color advice from the parents for this group of shirts which made things easier. With 3 boys the responses were mostly green and blue. I did get to do a couple of rainbow ones and I got to do some pink and purple for Ella. This tray also has 3 tea towels. Those are the long ones and the spiral in the upper let corner. I didn't really pick colors for the towels, I just used whatever was left over. I think the two rainbows at the bottom might actually be tea towels too. I finished off the day with the JMU shirts and, frankly, I'm worried about them a bit. My color recipes sometimes don't translate perfectly to tie dyeing or immersion dyeing. These are looking a little too blue (instead of dark purple). I am holding out hope because the blue used does wash out a lot so they still might turn the right shade of purple. Fingers crossed! Dyeing all of that took about 4 hours and I was beat when I was done. Today I'm happy to head off to my quilt club for our monthly sewing weekend. I'm working on a chandelier quilt top this weekend. I think there might even be 2 quilt kits in this one.
For the rest of the weekend my main goal is to get the December birthday postcards made and in the mail Monday morning. One of them is already a week late. Wednesday is my usual dyeing day for the shop. If I start on Wednesday I can have the fabrics ready for the shop by Monday. My schedule is a little more complicated this week because I have a bunch of tshirts to get tie dyed by next week too. Yesterday I did my normal dyeing and today I'm doing the tie dyeing. In my free time the past 2 days I worked on the hard part, the tyeing. These 8 will all be dyed in JMU colors (purple and gold) so that both families can have matching team shirts. The adults do not know that they are getting shirts too. Each of the kids will get 2 more shirts. To keep the straight I used a Sharpie to mark a code on the shirt label and I have a cheat sheet so that I get the right colors on the right shirts. I finished these about 7 last night and the looked over and saw the stack of remaining tea towels. Oh, why not.... Eight tea towels tied.... ...and then there will be 8 more printed with Color Magnet. No holiday themes in this batch so I'll have gifts read for the year. It's going to be a busy day! Since this is kind of a boring white post, here are some of my favorite ornaments from my tree. I use all glass ornaments and have been collecting them for years. The white one with red spots one is the one I purchased this year to add to the collection. I have a small group of friends that I used to work with and we all get together each month for drinks and to catch up. Sometimes we do other things together but the monthly catch up is our thing. There are 6 of us and we've been getting together pretty much since I retired in 2010. We exchange Christmas gifts each year. Kim, Lora and Mary always make homemade treats that Chris really enjoys. Kim makes amazing peanut brittle. Lora makes a yummy coffee chocolate bark and Mary makes killer Rum Balls and cookies. Mitzy and Susan always come up with something really clever and I always make something. I've done coasters (2 ways), potholders (need to do those again), dyed socks, dyed scarves, soap and lotion, glass dishes......I can't even remember everything. I've even made tea towels before but it was a long time ago. I know that because the ones I made for myself from that year are worn out. This year is tea towel year again and these are the 5 sets I selected, from the 10 sets I made, that I will gift to my friends this evening. Here's how I make them. I use stencils and screens and a product called Jacquard Color Magnet. If' you have been around the blog for a while you will know that I use this often. I have pretty severe allergies to the VOCs in fabric paints so this is the absolute safest way for me to get imagery on cloth. It's limiting because the results is tone on tone, but it doesn't fade over time like paints often does. The Color Magnet is bright yellow and the consistency of mucous. It's really slimy. It works best with screen printing but I have more holiday themed stencils than screens and I had to figure out the best way to apply it with a screen. I made a sample cloth a couple of weeks ago trying a few different methods and the best, by far, was using a dense sponge and sponging the stuff on. You have to be very careful using this product because once it touches the fabric it's on there. You really can't successfully wash it out. So any spatters or drips are going to show. Over time I've just learned to embrace that feature. Having a print surface is very helpful but you can't use the same print surface without letting it completely dry out between uses. Otherwise any bleed through of the product will stick to the next towel and it will show in the dyeing. I have a random roll of batting (that I probably was given or picked up cheap somewhere) that's thin polyester with a scrim. It's pretty useless for most things but it makes a great print surface. I cut 5 pieces of that and I printed 5 towels at a time. I did 5 a day giving the print pads a full day to dry before I did the next set of 5. It worked great because I was usually bored with the stenciling process after 5 towels anyway. This is what they look like after they are printed and while still wet. Once the dry the yellow image is very pale. Then you dye! This process works with pale colors. The dye magnet picks up most of the excess dye that didn't stick to the fabric and that's how you get a darker image. But if you dyed the item dark, then the image would not show well at all. Yellows and oranges don't really show up well either. I think it works best with blues, greens, purples, reds, grays, tans..... This process also works best with full immersion dyeing but I wanted some texture in the background so I used my normal low-water immersion. In one particular bin, because of the way I had the fabric arranged, the images didn't develop as well as I wanted. But I thought I knew a trick to deal with that. In my early days of using this product I learned that the Color Magnet keeps working for a few washes. I learned the hard way that I cannot put all of the colors together in one wash cycle because the items keep picking up dye and the images turn gray. I have to do the soak process by color. For the ones that didn't absorb as much dye as I wanted, I rinshed them enough to get the soda ash out and then put them in a bin of water with some green dye. The printed areas all took up more dye and the images became clearer. Because there was no soda ash, the rest of the towel didn't absorb any discernable additional dye. Here are all 10 designs that I made using every stencil and screen that I had in my stash that was remotely holiday themed. I made 2 of each design. The 5 at the top of the page are the ones I selected to give my friends this evening. These are probably my 3 favorite designs. The snowflake stencils worked really well and I like the other two with the blue middle bit and the green edges. I'll probably keep one of these sets for myself.
Next up in the Christmas making department is tie dye tshirts. I've got 2 weeks to get those done. So I've started working on Groovy 3 a little. Mostly I'm just in the planning stage. But first, I have this random photo of a shirt that I dyed last week. I picked up this shirt on vacation and dyed it in beachy colors. I love it! I have a sheet set that I want to dye and it will be done using a similar folding pattern but in a mandala format. I think it will be awesome. Back to Groovy. I'm doing a medallion format for this one so the first thing I did was create a center in EQ so I could see what size I need to cut the center pieces. Next I ironed the new fabrics I sunprinted and did some layouts to see which ones I want to use. I don't mind this center with the one on the loser right for the corner but I don't care for the two darker corners. I love this center, I don't like the lower right corner and don't love the upper right one either. The boobs in the upper right stand out too much. The upper left corner isn't bad at all. This is probably the best center choice and I'd probably pair it with the upper right corner. What do you think? Next I have to make a final decision and pick a sashing color so I can get it dyed next week. Here's another fun surprise from my ice dyeing day. This was the fabric that I put under the dyeing tray to catch the drip through dye. I LOVE how this turned out and Chris loved it too. I'm thinking about what I want to do with it but one idea is to use it as sashing for a quilt made with scrappy blocks made form solid-ish hand dyed fabrics. Imagine a bunch of star blocks on this background. I think it would be cool and look kind of like a galaxy.
I'll try to work on this more this weekend after my Country School sewing days sessions. Life is getting more balanced. I've got 6 crochet projects and I'm starting to build up a stable of quilting projects. I like having multiple (but not too many) projects on hand to be able to respond to my mood on any given day. Yesterday I worked on 2 projects. The first was to load and start quilting the two veterans quilt tops that I made last month. We had some storms roll through late in the day so I shut the machine down about halfway through. I'll get these quilted and bound this weekend. I don't expect to get much of anything done today, I have lots of errands to run. The other thing I'm doing is starting a new Groovy quilt. You can see Groovy 1 and Groovy 2 here. This time I decided that I wanted a medallion style quilt so I started playing around on the design wall. I liked where this was heading but I wasn't sure about that dark purple/blue corner. No problem, I can make more! Please don't get excited, these are for me, not for the shop. There might be one extra for the shop but, at the moment, I'm not planning to make more of these to sell. I'm trying to not raise my fabric prices so I'm having to cut out things that were already marginal for me and Crystals are #1 on that list. I made them because there were fun and people liked them but I don't make money from. They would have to be $50 and I wouldn't even pay that for one! Anyway, I set up 3 big and 6 small ones to ice dye. I put another fabric on a screen underneath to catch the drips and I can't wait to see what it does. I usually put this fabric in the bottom of the bin but I knew that it would just be brown because I was using a rainbow of colors. No matter what it does, it will be good because I can always cut it up into something! This looks promising!
This weekend I'll get all the fabrics washed and ironed and start doing the actual math to determine the block and sashing sizes. I'll work on the scrappy HST some more too and, who knows, I might start something else. |
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I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
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