Last week's dyeing was mostly about tie dyeing. A friend wanted some new shirts so I dyed these for her. She wanted 3 but I dyed one extra so she would have a little bit of a choice. If anyone wants the red/purple heart one it's a size small and is $20. Just leave a note on the comments. I dyed 2 sets of these cute onesies for babies that are coming soon. Both are girls and due within a month of each other, one on the East Coast and one on the West. I think they will look really cute in these.
This weekend I taught the new owners at The Longarm Network. That's always a fun day and it was a great class. Yesterday I finally got our tax info together to deliver Tuesday and I started quilting a sample for a new class on fills that I'll be teaching at The Longarm Network in the next couple of months. I'll post links once the classes are up. A few years ago Stephanie Wilds took a class called Fabricating Faces from Marilyn Wall at the John C Campbell Folk School. Lucky for me, her instructor, had been using my fabrics so Stephanie did her first faces block with my fabrics. She definitely found her niche with this technique. The quilt above is called Faces of Music and includes some of the most influential stringed instrumentalists of all times. I happen to be partial to Bela Fleck, here pictured with Toumani Diabate. She did all of these with fabric. For this quilt she used Claret, Maize, Denim and Forest Shades Packs. You can see detail photos of every artist block on her website. It should come as no surprise that Stephanie is now teaching From Photos to Fabric at John C Campbell since Marilyn retired. She has a weekend class coming up April 7 so there's still plenty of time to register. Class starts with you sending her an image which she manipulates for you prior to coming to class. I happen to have been given a sneak peek at the colors you will have to choose from for your project. Here are some pieces from her design wall. You can see what she did with the dog photo above. I think they are all amazing. But you can see that you can do faces, pets, or anything else! If this is something that you think you might like to do you can register for Stephanie's class here. I'll leave you with another of her beautiful pieces. I know this looks like a painting but that's all fabric! This is Swannanoa String Band, 1895 and you can read all of the details about this quilt on her website.
Now that we are inspired, let's all go and make some things this weekend! I think it took more hours to make this one block than to quilt the king sized Rainbow Quilt. By the way, I did finish quilting it but thought I'd spare you another photo until it's bound. I worked on this block over several days and feel like I'm getting my groove back for doing these types of blocks. As a reminder here is the block structure. I don't have any plans for these blocks. I'm jsut making them to have fun at this point.
My email box delivered more than spam this week!
Teresa Myles used the Bay of Campeche Gradient as the background for her appliqued mermaid. This is exactly how I envisioned Bay of Campeche being used.
If you have made something with Colorways fabric and want to share it you can upload images and information in the Customer Gallery. As a thank you for sharing you will receive a 20% coupon good on anything in the shop. I am loving how the quilting is looking on this Rainbow Quilt. I might even quilt the second one the same way. It's going so fast! I know that from an artistic point of view this is nothing to get excited about. But this is a bed quilt and I like for bed quilts to stay soft. I have one on my bed now that I over quilted and even after a few years of use and several washings it's still not cuddly. I've learned my lesson on quilting bed quilts. I only have 3 rows left! I won't finish it today because it's dyeing day but it will be off the frame Thursday and then it will be time for binding. You can bet that this king size quilt will not have a hand stitched binding. I do need to get started on the Zentangle label also. I ahead of schedule for a May 21 delivery date! That doesn't often happen.
I had a great week of dyeing last week and have lots of new things in the shop today. I know that the pale neutrals aren't the most exciting fabrics in the world but it is the value changes that can make or break a quilt. This is a nice collection of light value fabrics in a wide variety of colors. Sometimes you just need a little to finish off your art quilt and these fat eights will give you a little bit of 10 light value fabrics. I have a lot of Shades Pack options but I didn't have the grayed green that a customer recently needed. I've rectified that with this lovely soft mossy green that I'm calling Juniper. It's been a while since I had time to dye some shibori pieces but I fixed that last week too. This photo is just a hint at the new colors. You can check them all out in the shop.
I worked on Rainbow Quilts all weekend. This image will show you the very simple quilting that I'm doing on the king size quilt. It's all ruler work but you know that I love ruler work even more than free motion. The blocks are 6" square finished so I'm using a 6" circle ruler to make a half circle on all 4 sides of each block. Simple chevron lines in the outer triangles are helping me tame a little bit of stretching that happened in some of the black edge blocks. I like how the grayed purple thread is working. Black would have been way to stark. Patty commented about the "magic" of grayed purple thread in Saturday's post comments. I think there are 2 magical colors of thread and those are grayed purple and a sage or mossy green. They seem to work with everything. It took me years to get up the nerve to use any sort of contrasting thread. I used to make sure my quilting disappeared but I felt this quilt really did need a little extra focus. What I didn't need was a giant pin caught in the quilt. Last night I reached the halfway point and as I was quilting the next row I stitched over this pin. Fortunately I stitched over the shaft and not the pin head. It only took a few minutes to open the seam, get the pin out and restitch the seam but that seemed like a good place to stop for the night. I'm very please to have this half quilted. I spent Friday and Saturday sewing with my Country School Quilters buddies and I got the second Rainbow Quilt top together. This one will be a large lap quilt. I had 20 blocks left plus a bag of scraps so I started a baby quilt with a 3" border made of 1" strips. I'll finish that and decide what to do with the scraps (placemats, scrappy blocks, give them away) next month.
If you want to make a Rainbow Quilt for yourself my free pattern is here. I used Stash Packs of fat eighths to make mine but this would also be a great scrap quilt from your stash. I spent most of yesterday sewing with my quilt club, Country School Quilters. I'm working on putting all the leftover Rainbow Quilt blocks together into a twin size and baby quilt. Yes, I got a little carried away making those blocks! My one goal for the evening was to get this quilt basted and ready to quilt. That normally would be a quite simple task except that I picked this for the backing. It's a quilt back that I dyed (and then didn't use) for another project and it just happened to be big enough for this queen sized quilt. That was very convenient but it meant that I needed to center the quilt on the back. If you want to know how I do this you can check out my Centering a Quilt Back Tutorial. It's a lot of extra work and starts out with this kind of mess but it's all worth it in the end and after a couple of hours effort I had it done. The quilting is going to be all ruler work and I might be able to start it tomorrow evening. I think I'm going to use this grayed purple thread. I want the quilting pattern to show but not be as stark as black thread would be. I'll quilt a little and see how I like it.
But first there's another sewing day at quilt club and I should be able to finish the other 2 Rainbow tops. I didn't get my quilt basted last night because I was having too much fun sewing at my friend's house.I took my applique project and got one more blossom stitched so now my borders are 4.5% complete!
Today and tomorrow are sewing days with Country School quilters. I will get the leftover blocks Rainbow blocks sewn together for a top for a lap quilt. Maybe tonight I will get the quilt basted and I'll fire up the kiln again. It seems I'm working on a little bit of everything this week which means that it's a very happy week with no complaints. I was going to add the second shelf to the kiln yesterday to fire it but, fortunately I woke up yesterday morning with the clear realization that my plan would not work. The thermostat for the kiln would have been between the shelves and that would have screwed up the temperature for both shelves. Since I had the one shelf already loaded I ran a tack fuse cycle yesterday and hopefully can do the full fuse cycle this weekend. Yesterday was dyeing day and I decided that it's been too long since I did shibori. It's a time intensive process but you can't beat the results. I do 6 batches of shibori dye, 2 at a time and each batch takes about an hour. So while the dyes were working I ted up the last 7 of the beach towels that I'm dyeing for my family beach vacation. Tyeing it the tedious part so now I can get on to the fun...after I tie up some baby clothes and Tshirts. There's a tie dye session coming up really soon! My goal for today is to get the king size Rainbow quilt loaded and basted. I'll be centering this on a quilt back so it's going to take some time and patience to get it loaded. I ordered the batting last Wednesday from Amazon and was told that I'd have if by Saturday. It didn't ship until Saturday and finally arrived Tuesday. I stretched it out on FloMo yesterday to let the batting relax a bit. I'm anxious to get this think done.
On a side note, it's taken me 45 minute to write the short post. There's all kinds of activity on the pond this morning and I've mostly been counting the turtles on "Turtle Beach" and watching a Heron hunt. The turtles have a special spot where they like to soak in the sun and the Heron has been particularly entertaining this morning. I even saw it catch a fish. Before basting the quilt I'm heading out to hang out with a couple of friends this afternoon and I'll be taking my applique to work on a bit. |
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In Bloglovin you need to search "Colorways By Vicki Welsh" to find the blog. About Vicki
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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February 2025
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