 One of the main reasons that I got the Cricut was to do some screen printing and I decided to start off with some tea towels. Tea towels are such a great gift. They are easy to make and so useful. People aren't as sensitive to the colors and patterns because they are just going to use them to clean up messes. My friend recommended ORACAL 651 vinyl for screen printing and she was right. It transfers easy and stays stuck. I followed some instructions I found specific to the Cricut for the first set but switched to my normal screen printing method using a credit card, for the second set and got a much better result, as you will see.  I screenprint Color Magnet onto the towel before it's dyed. The printed areas absorb a lot more dye than the rest of the towel to create the image. This set was created for friend we will visit in Beaufort SC in September. She refers to their home as Skeeter Haven.  Since their house is near the beach I went for beach glass colors. These did not turn out perfect but I don't think she will mind the mistakes too much.  The first ones were so quick to make that I decided to make some for our Maine hosts. This image is straight from the Cricut library.  I made 6 so I can give each person 2. They might also get potholders!
Speaking of potholders, I have 5 left to make and I'll be totally done. But today I'll be working on the last 2 veterans quilts. It's too hot to do anything outside.  After a couple of years away it was fun to be ice dyeing again. The best part is that I don't have to iron these fabrics and take beauty photos! I can just slide by with the lazy photos that I'm going to post for you today. I decided to ice dye again because I wanted to make a colorful backing for the houses quilt top that I made a couple of months ago. I sort of wish that this one had more purple in it but once the ice is on you never really know where the dye is going. I like the patterning and I really like having the white spaces in this one. But I couldn't dye just one thing. In for a penny, in for a pound.   I dyed some fabric, t-shirts and tea towels. Both of these were gravity dyed. I'm not going to explain any of the methods that I used. There are lots of YouTube videos and that's where I first saw these things. The shirt on the left is one of my all time favorite things and I'll do more of this. The one on the right didn't work as well but I can screen print something on this and I think it will be cool for a kid.  These were all incline dyed and that tea towel is AWESOME.  I think incline dyeing is pretty self-explanatory. My set up wasn't optimal. I have some better ideas for the next time. I like the mandala piece. The t-shirt will benefit from a strong screen printed image.  This is a really cool folding technique called "glitch". I really like this and I like all three pieces. I need a little more practice folding and tying but I'm pleased with these first results.
 I have 4 more 40" square tapestries. The one on the lower right will be cut up in a project. The others are all winners. I think the one on the lower left will be the focus of my next Groovy quilt.  Here are 4 tea towels. The one on the top left will certainly get something printed on it. The others are good as they are and that lower right one is a big winner!  These are all small blocks, about 13" square. I don't know why I included that tea towel again. But the small pieces are mostly used in the Groovy quilts. These are always a crap shoot because the pieces are so small and you never know where the dye will fall.
For now, all of these are put away. Today I pick up Ella for our 3-day craft camp. I'll share photos of the projects that we work on.  Last week, for the first time in a month, I decided to dye some fabric. It was nice to be back mixing dyes without much of a plan. The primary reason for the session was to dye a bolt of backing fabric for veterans quilts. These should keep me and Brenda stocked for a couple of months.  I also dyed some kids' tshirts. I made the mistake of buying 50% poly shirts but that will work out OK. My young friend, Ella, is coming to stay with me a few days for a craft camp and we are going to get the Cricut busy putting things on these shirts for her and her brother.  I also decided to dye some new Dharma primary colors. This one is called Raven Black. It's not black, but it's a nice blue. I'm sure I'll use up the rest of the small container but I won't order this one again. I have a recipe for a color like this.  The other two colors I tested are Atomic Fireball and Blue Abyss. I mixed the red too weak but, even so, it's not red. It's more like orange and I have a recipe close enough to this color. The blue is a beautiful blue and I have a blue close to this too. I will use the rest of these dyes but I'm not sure I'd order more of them.  This image right here is one reason that I'm happy to not be selling fabric anymore. Reasonably often there are "trash threads" in the fabric. I wouldn't sell fabric like this. Sometimes I can pull the threads out but sometimes I'd have to re-dye a piece. This one isn't so bad but when there's a white thread on a dark fabric, it really shows. For my own quilts, it doesn't matter. I can cut around it if I need. But it's sure annoying!  I also did a few parfait dyes. This was the first kind of dyeing that Anne and I ever did. I like all the texture that comes from this technique. Here's a tutorial that I found if you want to try it out.
 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. |
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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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