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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.
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 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. It was a very busy weekend with yard work, washing the car and lots of other chores. Washing the car was kind of a waste of time because it's covered in pollen again but at least I got it vacuumed and the windows cleaned for our trip.
I also got to see my favorite kids Sunday and was able to tale this little dress to Ella. The tutorial popped up in my Youtube channel last week and I just had to make it. Norma does nice tutorials for doll clothes and this dress was really quick to make up.  I don't like taking things to Ella without taking something for Eli. I found a spare tshirt from the ones I bought for his Christmas gifts do I dyed it this week and then painted it with a parrot stencil. That turned out to be perfect because he has seen a parrot that afternoon at the local farmer's market. Their Dad and I taught them how to play Go Fish after I got myself totally dizzy spinning Eli around outside. It was a fun visit.  While I was dyeing gradients I dyed more of the vintage napkins that I have. The cross stitch cocktail napkins were pretty grungy but they dyed up great! The dark blue ones have an embroidered element that I thought would show up but apparently that thread is cotton! These will be fine to pair up with some future placemats. I am not opposed to making a set of 3 placemats or dyeing another odd napkin for a set of 4.  Glass bottle slumping is continuing. I can run the kiln once a day. One program takes several hours and then I have to leave it several more hours to cool down. I've given a couple of bottles away already and I had a couple of experimental failures but, by the time I'm done, I'll have plenty to give to the family at the beach.  I've turned 3 corners on the wedding quilt but I don't know if I'll finish it before we leave tomorrow afternoon.
 The weekend is here and my first order of business is to spread a truckload of mulch today. It's supposed to get into the 70s today so my car might even get washed too! But I started this morning getting the second set of bottles out of the kiln. I upped the top temperature for this one and I did get better definition on the slump on the tree image. The blue bottle is a Bombay sapphire bottle and the dark brown one is a Bailey's Irish Cream bottle. I got a little bit of kiln wash transfer on the Bailey's bottle that I cleaned up with vinegar. I started a new set up this morning with a little lower temperature to see if it helps with the kiln wash transfer.  This week I also finished dyeing this custom quilt back for a friend. She wanted pale shades of Carolina Blue. The color isn't quite accurate in this photo. I think we picked a color that's very true to Carolina Blue.  I'm also making progress on the wedding quilt binding. I do a couple of thread lengths every morning and I'm about 60% done. I'll keep plugging away at this.  Usually in the afternoon I get some time to sit and sew half square triangles. I'll need 90 big squares and 90 4-patch squares for a veterans quilt so I have a long way to go. It's nice sewing to do while I'm listening to a book.....right now it's a really long book!
This is what I expect my weekend to be like. I hope you have a great one too. I don't have a shop update this week because I'm about to head out of town for a long weekend! So I need to tell you that any orders placed after today (Tuesday) will be shipped Monday, March 14.  I do have a couple of little things to share today. First off is a little dye test. A friend and I are planning a dye project for the back of one of her quilts. We think that Color Magnet might be the way to go. I wanted to do a test to see if the Color Magnet would work over Washable Markers. I use washable markers a lot with my dyeing and it doesn't have any effect at all on the dye. But I was kind of surprised to see that it does seem to provide some level of resist with the Color Magnet.  Orange, by far, was the worst.  Black and brown had the lest effect. Isn't that weird and interesting?  In other news the gingham baby blanket is coming along. I think I only have 12 rows left and then I can add the border. I'm not taking this to the beach with me so I'll finish this off next week. I'm taking a new project to the beach to start. I like how the blanket is looking but I forgot how thick these gingham blankets are. It might be more of a floor blanket and I'm OK with that.
Our friend from England are here and we are looking forward to the month to catch up and have some fun together again! I haven't put one stitch in the postage stamp quilt yet but I kind of have good excuses. Tuesday I took Mom to Farmville to visit her former next door neighbor. The wife (a quilter) died a couple years ago and Mom made two quilts from her stash for her granddaughters. We went to deliver them, The husband was anxious for us to take more fabric back with us and I'll have that update at the end of this post. Yesterday was dyeing day and I dyed over 50 yards of fabric so I didn't do anything at all (except a little bit of crochet) before heading to bed.  But, in little bits of time I got the 4 safari scrappy placemats done! I love making placemats from quilt scraps. It's a great way to use them, it's a nice memory of the quilt and I actually use them! These are made from the scraps of the Safari Quilt that I made for my SIL. I used the scraps whatever size they were and just pieced giant crumb blocks. I got 4 placemats out of the pile of scraps.  I've mentioned before that I use old (clean, of course) flannel sheets as my batting so that they don't wad up too bad in the washer and dryer. I like quilting them pretty heavily too as another way to control them getting out of shape. For these I did lines 1/2" apart, more or less. While I was quilting them I was thinking about what color to dye napkins and I couldn't stop thinking about the possibility of shibori dyeing them.  Well, imagine my surprise to find that I can shibori dye napkins! These turned out much better than I expected.  They don't match the placemats on color but they do match in spirit so I'm keeping them. The reason that they don't match in color is that my color recipes don't work for immersion dyeing. They work perfectly for the low water immersion dyeing that I developed them for, but they don't translate to immersion. In my normal dyeing that blue/gray would be a deep chocolate brown. There will be more shibori napkins in my future. Some dyed with clamped designs would be really cool. Next time I might dye the napkins first and then pull fabrics to match but that would kind of defeat the "use scraps" purpose of placemats. Quite a dilemma.  So, back to the Farmville visit. Mom's friend really wanted us to take a lot of fabric and supplies. Mom did take a bag of mostly batiks but I don't really do much with commercial fabrics and I don't like to take things that I am not sure I can use. But I did clear out a small drawer of heavy weight fabric scraps to use for walker caddies or dog beds and I took this bin of batting scraps. If the scraps are big I'll piece them together for small quilts or I'll chop it all up for dog beds. He was very happy to have a little spot on a shelf emptied out.
I know, I promised this tutorial over 2 weeks ago! It has taken some time to get the photos edited and the tutorial written up but it's finally here. I have outlined the process that I use for ice dyeing but if this is something that you are seriously interested in please take the time to read/watch how other people do it as well. There are as may processes for ice dyeing as there are family mashed potato recipes. It's good to check them all out.
In this tutorial I also show how I create the Galaxy fabrics as a by-product of the ice dyeing process. I don't like to waste dye and ice dyeing is a huge dye wasting process. Creating the Galaxy fabrics is a great way to use that wasted dye. T shirts would be awesome dyed in the bottom of an ice dyeing bin. Get the tutorial here and have fun ice dyeing your own fabric. If you see any typos or if anything is confusing, please let me know. I'm happy to fix the document.
Yesterday was "dyeing day" but it was also cleaning day. When the cleaning lady is coming I try to at least get the piles of things off the floor so that she van vacuum the space underneath. While doing my "maid preps", as Chris calls them, I tripped over a pile of things that I dyed last week with the Crystals and Galaxies. When I ice dye I want every inch of the screen covered so I often add whatever dyeable things I can find to the mix. These are 2 sets of napkins. I had 2 boxes of thrift store napkins that a friend gave me. I still have a ton of them left but I always dye a set to go with any new set of placemats. At the moment I have a bin of dyed napkins that need placemats. Maybe my next obsessive sewing weekend can be a placemat weekend. I do use them a lot and have several that are in need of retirement. These will be fun to work with to design matching placemats.  I always seem to have a bunch of aprons around and I think I've given some to all my friend and family. I heard about a charity collecting them recently so these might go there.  There are some of the leftover golf towels that I dyed for my husband and his high school golf buddies in March. I'll save these in the gift closet.  This is the funniest part. I dyed 3 pair of socks but I can only find a pair and a half. Hopefully the others will show up at some point.  Then there were some white tshirts left from the ones that I dyed for Eli for his birthday. He'll get these too.  Finally, just for me, I dyed some 12" squares. I feel a 3rd Groovy quilt coming on.
Yesterday was a very long dyeing day so in the evening I just sat and did some crochet and loom knitting and listened to a book. I have a finished crochet project and some thoughts on loom knitting that I'll probably share tomorrow. Today I might get a quilt loaded to quilt but first I have a little bit of dyeing to do for a custom order. It's a little complex so fingers crossed that I get the effect that my customer wants. This weekend is sewing weekend with my quilt club so I'll be packing up my veterans quilt sewing tomorrow morning and heading to our meeting place. Yay! Yesterday wasn't ALL ironing, but it was close.  I started off the day visiting (and sewing) with my friend, Marcy. She also has an Innova and we provide moral support to each other when things aren't going quite right. She helped me when I tried timing my machine the first time and I went over yesterday to help her with tension issues. I took this quilt kit to work on using her machine. I started this in February when I got to go to the beach with Kim. I'll take it to Maine to finish putting together. I think I'm going to really love it. It's got kind of a soothing vibe. If this one works out to my liking I'll make more with my hand dyed scraps.  Eventually I had to leave Marcy and come home to the giant pile of ironing. Here are all of the ice dyed fabrics except for the quilt backs and the few pieces that are already in the shop. My plan is to get all of these in the shop by Monday. I'll work on the quilt backs next week.  Aside from editing fabric photos I think I will tackle the bin of batting scraps left from the June quiltapalooza. I'm seeing my Richmond Animal League friend tonight and it would be nice to get these made and out the door today. I haven't done a yarn update in a while but I have been slowly plugging away on my projects. The blanket is almost done! In this photo it's folded in half and there's only the upper left corner to finish. I let myself crochet twice a day for 30 minutes each and I have 3 left hand fingers taped up (thumb, pinkie and ring). It's working and my hand continues to improve. I absolutely love this Cascade Cartwheel yarn. It's a bulky weight (great for my hands right now) 100% acrylic roving yarn. It is a little splitty but it's so beautiful that I don't mind the sporadic splits. I want all of the colors!
Once my crochet session is done I switch over to loom knitting. I'm working on my first scarf and I will make a hat to match. The scarf will be blocked. It's not the best scarf in the world but it's good for a first try. The yarn is Premier Serenity Chunky and it got it because it was on clearance. It's super soft and easy to work with. I'll talk more about my thoughts on loom knitting (good thoughts) when this scarf is done. It's time to get busy on some dog beds. I started moving at 8am yesterday and I didn't sit down until about 6. It was a long day but a really, really good day. First off, I did get 2 more veterans quilts quilted but I ran out of energy when it came to trimming and photographing them. You'll have to wait until Monday for that.  I started the morning washing out all of our ice dyed fabrics. It took about 2 and a half hours to rinse everything and put them in various soaking bins then the water was changed several times during the day. We are both thrilled with the results.  Here's one of the big quilt backs. I spread it out in the driveway to let it dry a bit before I carried it through the house and to the basement for soaking. The color isn't quite true. It's not turquoise, it's more of a sky blue but I and over the moon with this one. Actually I'm over the moon with all three quilt backs from this batch. This one will be in the shop soon.  Anne came over about 11 and she got started quilting her picnic quilt. It's a small quilt so it only took her a couple of hours. I had gotten it loaded and basted the night before so she was ready to jump in with quilting. She used the Happy Times panto. It's a great panto for beginners.  Look at this awesome backing fabric! isn't is perfect for a picnic quilt?  While she was quilting I got the great idea to do ANOTHER batch of ice dyeing today! Total insanity. But, why not. I've gotten a few question from yesterday's ice dyeing post so I'll answer them next week as I'm pondering a brief tutorial on how I do ice dyeing.....which is different from the way some other people do it. There are lots of right ways to ice dye. It's good to experiment.  The bins were all set up and ready to go by 5 pm yesterday and then I didn't do much of anything else after that except to look forward to crawling into bed.
Today won't be quite so strenuous. I won't be doing prep work and wash out on the same day. I might even have some quilting time today. Aside from ironing and photographing fabric, my weekend will be devoted to veterans quilts. The race is on to get to 20! |
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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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