A Quilt Show & More Dyeing

Ode to Gee's Bend by Cheryl Wittmayer

Yesterday I went to the Evergreen Piecemaker's quilt show. That was so much fun! I love going to quilt shows. So many wonderful quilts and so much inspiration for the price of admission. I took a ton of pictures, but I'm only sharing two quilts with you. These were my absolute favorites.

The quilt above, "Ode to Gee's Bend", was made with Moda's shot cottons and hand-quilted with perle cotton, I believe. I love the composition of this quilt and the free-hand quilting adds a whole extra element that makes it so much more exciting.

Here's a closeup on that wonderful quilting.

A True Patchwork by Jan Crawford

This quilt was made with antique blocks made by a family member, I believe. Ms. Crawford had a total of 3 quilts in this show, all done with antique blocks that she inherited. Isn't the yellow in this quilt wondeful? It just draws your eye around the quilt, and the indigo blues keep it all under control and unified.

Here's a closeup so you can see some of these great old fabrics.

Of course, I had to visit the vendors. I tried to resist, but they just called to me too loudly! *grin* I got the first DVD in the series by Patsy Thompson on machine quilting. Her web site is here. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but am anxious to see it. I also got some great buttons, and this gallon bag full of batik scraps. It reminds me of Wanda of Exuberant Colors' wonderful batik projects. The possibilities in this bag get my heart going pit-a-pat!

Last week I dyed some more fabrics while we had such beautiful weather. I found this book at the local library and it inspired me to try some of her techniques. These fabrics above (you can click on all the pictures to biggify) were placed underneath the tie-dye fabrics to catch the extra dye and not waste it. These pieces are fat 1/8's folded in half. I love this fabric that I used. It's an uninspiring white on icky tan to start with, but it takes the dye beautifully. I have one little fat 1/8th left. Sadness. . . .

This fabric above and the ones below were done with tie-dye. I haven't done tie-dye since high school, and I won't tell you how long ago that was! This book had not only great directions for how to fold, she also included pictures of what the fabric would look like afterwards. So I could decide on how I wanted to fold the fabric based on the final product.

All these fabrics are fat 1/4's folded in half. They've been ironed, even though they still look creased. That's just where the dye collected on them. The dye/paint I use is Setacolor Transparent Color and it's sun sensitive which causes the dye to intensify where the sun hits it. After 24 hours in the baggie with the dye, I took the fabric bundles out to dry out and they got "sunned". (I could have lessened that effect by keeping them out of the sun, or using the dye that isn't light sensitive.)

This piece didn't get enough dye squirted down in the folds, but I kind of like the white showing too. Now I just have to decide how I'm going to use these fabrics. I'm getting quite a pile of hand-dyes - enough that I'm starting to feel comfortable about cutting into some of them!

Here's Shade, testing to see if the hand-dyes are comfy enough! I think he likes them.

My "Woooo" from the previous post has arrived at Tonya's, along with many others. She's posted a picture of all the Halloween words that she has so far. Take a look! It's a wonderful sampler of fonts that you can do with the free-pieced words. Some of these just amaze me!