Hand-dyed T Shirts

I'm getting ready to sell some fabrics, T-shirts, scarves, books, etc. at our next Almond Country Guild Meeting, where for $10, members can rent a table to sell their "Trash to Treasures."  Everything I'm selling are treasures, its' just that I have too many of them.  I have discovered over the last few years that I enjoy dyeing fabrics and wearables probably more than making them into quilts, even though I enjoy that as well.  So I have accumulated a lot of arashi and itajime shibori fabrics, along with some T-shirts and scarves which will be for sale at the March meeting.  I'm also selling some great quilt books that I no longer use but will hopefully be a treasure to someone else.

All the T shirts are 100% cotton, machine washable and can be thrown in the dryer.
 The shorts sleeved ones are $20 each and the one long-sleeved on is $25.
  Not bad for a one-of-a-kind wearable.  This one is an ice-dyed shirt.

This shirt is part arashi (tied resist) and part itajime (clamped shape resist) 

This shirt is also an ice-dyed one.  I think the patterns resemble flowers.

This shirt reminds of patterns found in marble.

Ice Dyeing

Last week, I did some more ice dyeing. Here's pictures of my best results from the latest batch.

I like how the Robin's egg light blue color falls to the background,
 making the other colors float on top creating more depth.
 

  I folded and clamped this one with a wooden heart shape
 before putting on the ice and dye.

I like like the  look of crystals in this one.

Recently I won a copy of Nancy Eha's wonderful book entitled, Bead Creative Art Quilts. http://www.beadcreative.com/  Nancy was a guest of Beth Schnellenberger http://quilterbeth.blogspot.com/ on one of my favorite blogs to follow, And Then We Set It on Fire, see link to this blog on the right.  The book arrived today and it is filled with great diagrams and examples. I want to thank Beth and Nancy for their wonderful tutorials and for the great, inspirational book.  Beads can really add a lot of texture and sparkle to a quilt..  Below are pictures of a quilt where I used beads in the center of the flower.

Petalicious  52" by 45"

Closeup of beaded center

Class with Lura Schwarz Smith

 Today and yesterday was spent learning how to paint faces, flowers, landscapes and most anything else you'd want to paint, from a fabulous teacher by the name of Lura Schwarz Smith.  If you are a quilter, you probably know who she is.  If you haven't heard of her yet, check out her website,  http://www.lura-art.com/  The class was sponsored by my guild, Almond Country Quilt Guild.  Thanks to Sheila for getting the class organized and making it easy for us to learn from a wonderful teacher.

It was a busy two days as we did a series of drawing exercises and  learning the importance of value.  "Value does all the work and color gets all the credit," Lura reminded us.  Below are some photos of some of the students hard at work, dabbling with all the wonderful 'substances' that Lura brought for us to try out.  We played with Tsukineko inks, Prismacolor pencils, Fabrico and Sakura markers, among other drawing tools.

Laura gives advice to Ginny on her beautiful work in progress.

Lura at the drawing board.

She really was a very giving, positive teacher.  At times I was frustrated with my drawing, but if you aren't frustrated, you probably aren't really learning anything new.  She was great at making us feel confident we would get it.

Designing a Quilt with Parfait Dyed Fabrics

Today, I was working with some fabrics I made a couple of years ago by using the parfait dyeing method.  I folded, scrunched and squished three- half yard pieces of fabric into a gallon size pitcher.  In between each fabric, I poured some highly concentrated liquid procion dyes and topped it all off with some soda ash.  The process is similar to what is described in Ann Johnston's great book, Color by Accident, which has some great recipes for creating beautiful low-water immersion dyed fabrics.   These fabrics though, have more folds due to how tightly they fit into the pitcher, which in turn creates some wonderful  stained-glass like designs, at least that's what I got in this batch.  Here's a couple photos of the fabrics and closeups.

Below is my sketch idea for using these fabrics.  I like taking photos of my fabrics and playing around with cutting them up, rather than cutting up the fabric. 

Arashi Shibori Quilt Design

Well, another week plus has gone by since my last post.  Starting a new semester always takes a lot of work.  Due to the state not funding public education the way it used to and should fund, I have to spend many hours figuring out  how much of a colored pencil or ounces of glaze a child will use on a project, so I can come up with a figure to charge them for materials that they take home on each project.  It's a very long, horrible mathematical word problem, and math is not my strong suit.  After spending too many hours on that yesterday, I finally got to spend some glorious time in my studio.  I squared up one of my arashi shibori pieces that is a painting in itself and cut up another piece to place narrow strips on each side of the larger piece.  I played around with the placement of the lines to create some movement from the center out to the edges. Next, I played around with a variety of fabrics to use as a border or binding, but decided against all of them.  They just looked like unneeded additions to extend an artwork that was finished already.  Here's a picture of my new design on the wall, ready to stitch up.  Let me know what you  think.

Arashi Shibori Fabrics

Sorry I haven't posted in a week.  Being a middle school art teacher, this is a very busy time of the year.  The semester is over tomorrow,  grades for the 180 students I teach are due and then there's gearing up for the next semester, complete with some new students, parent letters, collecting materials fees, ordering supplies and yada, yada, yada.  On top of that we have been having many discussions on school safety with implementation of new policies that are quite frankly, just depressing.  What kind of crazy society do we live in where we have to practice herding children into a safe place because someone might be outside our door with an assault weapon and 30 clips of ammo.  If President Reagan could get shot with 10 highly trained secret service agents surrounding him,  I don't think arming teachers, many of whom have never fired a weapon, is the answer either.   This whole tragedy and its ensuing discussions and arguments is just depressing.

I'm hoping to find a little time to escape to my studio during this three day weekend to play more with my arashi shibori fabrics that I have on my design wall.  They've been up there for a couple weeks or so.  Years ago, I heard a very interesting talk on creativity and the importance of the incubation period when designing.  So, I like to place fabrics that I'm thinking will work together in a quilt, up on my design wall, so I can see them and play around with them before cutting into them.  This allows me to come up with a variety of ideas for color pathways and arrangements.  So this is what's on my wall now.  What do you think?