 This week's dyeing focused on some new Stash Packs for the shop and for the AQS show in October. I got this set done yesterday and have another for today. Not particularity interesting but it's what's going on around here at the moment!  But next week is going to be a lot more fun because there will be a giveaway here on the blog every day! Don't forget to stop by and enter every day, Monday - Saturday.
Meanwhile, the shop is going to be quiet and I will not be shipping orders. Regular shipping will resume May 29 if I can tear myself away from the beach.  One more done! Only 2 corners to go. I am starting to get seriously nervous about what I will do next. I will have to have another project ready before football season starts in August. Who am I kidding? I need to have something else ready before I put the last stitch into this one. It will be too stressful not to have something else to work on by my TV chair. If my hands aren't buys sewing they will be busy shoving food (that I don't need) in my mouth. Time to get to some serious thinking and planning.  Meanwhile the new Eastern Bluebird family is doing great! All 5 hatched and look healthy.
Last weekend was sewing weekend with Country School Quilters. I look forward to it every month. We go to our meeting place and are able to set up our machines for 2 days. Sometimes there's more talking than sewing but it's a good time regardless. This time Mom went with and we had a fun time chatting and sewing with everyone. We only got a few hours in each day but I made some good progress on Antelope Canyon.  I pulled it out this morning to cut the gradient for the borders and see how it looks so far. I'm going to pack this to take on vacation in case we have any bad weather days next week. This is the layout that I planned for the quilt and I'd align the gradient with the blue in the quilt and gradient adjacent....like I'm trying to show in the bottom of the photo. I love this gradient and may make a modified version for the shop. I love how it looks with the quilt too. This pattern finished at 74" square which, in my humble opinion, is useless for a queen size bed. I need this one to drape over the edge to cover the sheets and mattress. Gradient borders was the answer.  Just for grins I rotated the blocks and borders to see how this layout would work and I love the effect of the gradient on the edge. Of course that might be different once the blocks are full size. After I get them done I'll lay it out again and see what I like best.
It would be really cool to finish this next week. It's absolutely doable. There are only a few more rounds on each block and the borders are basically slabs. It all depends on whether I find a good book (a real paper book) to read next week. Last year I read The Gene and couldn't put it down. Plus it was about 900 pages. I haven't picked a book for this year so if you have a good non-fiction recommendation I'd love to hear it. You might remember last year when I made some cards from a damaged vintage linen that was embroidered by my Grandmother. Well, apparently that exercise freed me to cut up more linens!  These are some doilies that my Grandmother embroidered. These kinds of heirlooms are a bit vexing. You don't want to toss them out but you also know that no one will ever use them. The one on the left has been on a shelf in my bathroom closet for YEARS and the one on the right was in my Mom's closet for DECADES. In fact, when she was moving I found it in the yard sale pile. I decided to rescue it for her Mother's Day card and them I took the other one and made it into cards for my Aunts.  Could a postcard be easier than this one? I fused on a base layer of green to match the leaf stitches and then I fused the embroidery on top. Add a back, finish the edges and it's ready to mail!  This doily had 2 embroidered edges so I got 2 cards from it. These went to my Aunts.
Easy peasy! If only I would design Christmas postcards this simple.  Copper Trails #2 by Patricia Caldwell Patricia made this beautiful piece using the Nightfall Gradient with cotton threads, dyed wool yarn, small round jewelry connectors and medium pieces of copper. She's included inserts of Black and Sunset fabrics. The finished size is 29.5" x 40.5" and it's available at the Sedona Art Center.
If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery. In appreciation you will receive a 20% shop coupon that's good for 3 months! I'm very excited that I decided to try vending at the AQS show in Virginia Beach this October but it means a lot of prep work to get ready. I'm really enjoying planning the booth layout and what inventory that I need to have ready. I estimate that I will need about 800 yards (or more) for a show of this size. Next comes the challenge of figuring out what the make up of that inventory needs to be.  Of course I have spreadsheets! I'm keeping track of what I want to take and how much of it I have ready. I have storage bins all around the house (hidden as much as possible) to keep it all in for the next few months. But this means that I have to double the amount of fabric that I dye each week.  I used to dye on Wednesday, wash out on Thursday, soak Friday, rinse and dry on Saturday and iron on Sunday. Now I dye Tuesday and Wednesday and double all of the other schedules too. Now when I dye gradients I dye 2 of each: one for the internet shop and one for the show. These are Gray Skies and Black that I dyed yesterday. Yes, I batch in a sauna. Only because we have it in the basement. Chris used it for a while but decided he didn't like it. It's a GREAT dyeing tool!  But that's not all! I'm also dyeing 4 new Reflections designs this week. These are all for the internet shop. They will not be at the show. So that's 40 yards Wednesday.  This is the washout and starting the soaking process for all the stuff I dyed Tuesday. This is about 43 yards of Shades Packs. For the Shades Packs I dye whatever customers ordered for the week and the same colors for the show. It's all pretty efficient and I'm building up the inventory faster than I expected. That's all really good but it does mean a lot less quilting and mosaic. I'm not complaining because I'm really enjoying the dyeing and show preparations but it does mean there's less good stuff for the blog. I don't think you want to see fabric dyeing photos every week! I may share some if it seems the least bit interesting but there are likely to be some skipped days this summer (like tomorrow) when I just don't have anything blog-worthy to share. Next week will be better, though, because it's Country School sewing this weekend and I'll get to work on my Antelope Canyon quilt again!  This is where I left off last month and I'm excited to work on it again. Plus Chris and I will finish off the Bosch series so I will make some applique progress....and I'm going to go hang out in my friend's pool. I'm so glad summer is finally here!
 Once I got the borders sewn onto my quilt I couldn't wait to get started on the applique. Chris and I are watching the 4th season of Bosch and I'm using the time productively. I can't believe I'm so close to finishing this quilt top.  In other news, the Eastern Bluebirds are back! We have 3 nest boxes. One has a wasp nest, one has an abandoned nest but this one will soon have some baby bluebirds. We will clear the other 2 boxes to see if we can't get some other families started.
 Slowly but surely I'm making progress! I've had a couple of free hours to work on the wall since I last posted. I"m so glad I'm doing the background as I do the beads. Filling the whole wall in with white at the end would have been so boring!  Finishing the top third of the wall was a major milestone and provides a lot of motivation to keep going and get this done this year.
This week is a really busy week so I don't know if I'll make more progress until next week....but we'll see! All in all it was a good weekend. My jaw is finally better so I was able to get back to doing a bit of quilting and a lot of ironing. I had over 80 yards of fabric to iron this weekend!  I finally got the table clear and gathered enough nerve to sew the borders onto the applique quilt.  Don't worry, the borders aren't wavy. I just don't have it laying flat on the floor.  You can see that I had to pull out a bit of stitching on the vine so that I could adust the vine trailing under the blossom.  Here it is ready to stitch the 4 corner blossoms! This is the biggest floor spot that I have in the house (that's also clean enough for a white quilt) so you can't see the whole thing but you get the idea. I'm thrilled!  For stitching I've folded the quilt and shoved it in a pillowcase with only one corner sticking out. Hopefully this will work fine. I'm anxious to get back to stitching.
I have seriously accomplished almost nothing the past week while I've been dealing with this jaw pain. I"m not surprised that I'm having the problem. I seem to always have some sort of muscle/tendon pain at all time. Sometimes it's my right knee, sometimes my feet, sometimes my left hip or left wrist or, like now, left shoulder and jaw. Some of it's genetics and some of it is bad habits. I think my current problem is mostly bad habit in the form of my cell phone and tablet so I'm weaning my self off those tools. Maybe if I can get myself to spend less time on the technology tools I'll get more constructive things done!  Over the past week I've spent most of my time holding ice packs to my face and stretching my neck and shoulders but I have made a bit of progress on a couple of projects and one is Pleiades II. Here are a few more block sets that I've cut out this week.  This is, more or less, the layout that I'm going for. The finished quilt might be smaller than this one. It all depends on the number of block sets that I can get out of my current stash. I am not buying more fabric!  Here's how many block sets I have cut out so far. I think this is about half what I need. They aren't arranged in any way yet. I'm just slapping them on the design wall to see how they look so far. A few of these won't make the final cut either. It's slow, but it's coming along.
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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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