New Monet-Like Ice-Dyed Fabrics

The other day I created a couple more fabrics for my blue,-green-yellow stash. I have a lot of strips cut and am wanting to create an improv style quilt, but wanted some focal point blocks here and there. I love how these turned out. They remind me of Monet's water lily paintings. Who knows? These might take me off in a completely different direction.

Monet's Water Lilies, 1922

Soy Wax Ice Dyed Fabrics

Here are some of the soy wax ice-dyed fabrics I created at last weekend's fabulous workshop given by Nick and Chase of Dragonfly Dyeworks  http://www.dragonflydyeworks.com/ at SLO Creative Studios http://www.slo-creative.com/

 

This a cotton gauze piece. Love the values and textures I got using the wax with the ice. 

I used a stencil of bamboo trees in the center.  Although you can't really see them clearly, 

it still made a great design I think.

 

This fabric is an overdyed one.  Below is the arashi shibori piece I started with.  You can see glimpses of it through the soy wax and ice dyed patterns. 

 

Above  and below are  silk pieces.

Newest Ice-Dyed Quilt

This quilt was finished the day before putting it in my show at the library,so I didn't get a chance to blog about it. This quilt was created  from two beautiful ice-dyed pieces of fabric which I cut apart and put back together. Below are the fabrics with which I started.

  

I cut both of them apart into the same shapes, then shuffled and sewed them together carefully.

 I cut the quilt apart again, fusing it to black fabric.  

Below is a closeup of some of the hand embroidery that is throughout the quilt.

I really enjoy the process of hand embroidery.  My earliest experience with embroidery was learning how to do it at about the age of 11, as taught by my mom,  on pre-stamped towels and dresser cloths.  Remember those blue stamped fabrics with days of the week, or teacups, girls with watering cans, etc?  All the women in our family (4) would work on these in the car on our long family camping trips from Wisconsin to New York, Washington, California, etc. Doing it again brings back lovely memories.  I find handwork to be a very meditative process.

Ice Dyed Fabric Quilt

Happy New Year to everyone!  Been laying low, still fighting this cold with three more days of antibiotics to take.  Hopefully by then it will be over. Had a busy weekend, helping one of our sons move out.

Found some time and energy to cut out and fuse my ice dyed fabrics, that I pieced together in November, to a black background.  Was a new way of working for me with making the cuts this way. I used clear film over the fabric to draw out exactly where I wanted the 'fractures'.  Next I  put tracing paper over the clear film to create the four pattern pieces.  Hadn't done any fusing in awhile and I find that stuff rather tricky to use, but pleased that it came out how I envisioned it.  Started to do a little stitching on it last night.  Back to work tomorrow and next weekend will be helping my other son move, so not sure when I"ll get back to it.

Over Dyeing Ice Dyed Fabrics and Scarf

I had some time earlier in the week to add a little black to two pieces of ice dyed fabric and one scarf.  Here is fabric number 1 prior to dyeing.

Next I accordion folded the fabric, rolled it up, put it in a container and drizzled dye on top of the folded edges.

Below is the finished fabric.

I couldn't find a picture of this fabric prior to last week's overdyeing, but it was similar to the one above.  Below is a picture of how I swirled and crunched up the fabric into a plastic box. Then I drizzled dye on top and very strategically.

Here is the finished piece.

And last, but not least, a silk scarf that needed a little more black.

Beginning New Quilt with Ice Dyed Fabrics

Over the last couple of weeks I've been contemplating a new art quilt.  It's so hard for me to cut up  some of my hand dyed fabrics because they are abstract paintings just left alone, but I just got over that idea and cut the two below into rectangles.

 

I rearranged them, sewed them back together and got this. The textures resemble rock surfaces to me.  I like the play of light and dark in this arrangement.

I have a couple ideas I'm playing around with for the next step in this quilt's evolution.  Some skinny line insertions perhaps or reverse applique. Still cogitating on this one.

What's Happening on My Design Wall

This last weekend, I went through my ever increasing stack of hand-dyed fabrics to figure out what  to do with them.  Some of the shibori and ice dyed  fabrics have such intense areas of pattern that to cut them up seems a shame.  Yet, I don't think they are all candidates for whole cloth quilts either.  A few of them might be.  So I threw these up onto my design wall to see how they would work with each other and did a few sketches.  The marbled fabrics are a little tricky to integrate well with other fabrics.  So I was looking at patterns and colors that played well with each other.  All of the ones below are hand-dyes except for the one with the gorgeous black background with green and orange patterns third from the right end. I picked that one up at PIQF at the Ananse Village booth.  They always have such wonderful batiks from Africa.

The small strip of black and white patterned fabric on the right is also commercial.  Black and white seems to always work well with lots of brights.

Sometimes I think I should just try to sell all my dyed fabrics, but I like them too much and it's a lot of work marketing yourself online, for which I don't have time or interst.  Looking forward to having some time to figure this all out.  

More Shibori and Discharged Fabrics

Here are a couple more fabrics I made recently.The one below was an ice-dyed piece that I arashi shibori dyed.  Below is a closeup of one area.

This was an ice dyed piece as well which I then stamped using a bleach gel.  I think the gel was little old and not very strong.  Might need to do more of that to this one when I have a chance.

Using the Design Wall to Start a New Art Quilt

Having  delivered one of my quilts that was purchased from the May show at Studios on the Park in Paso Robles, I came home and started to plan a new art quilt.  This doesn't mean I'm done with others that I've started, but I like to have projects in different stages.  Sometimes I feel like cutting, other times I feel like piecing or quilting, so it's nice to have options.

The first stage for me is auditioning fabrics so that's what I started to do this weekend (in between lots of work for school.)  Here are pictures of some fabrics that I'm thinking will play well with each other.

All except two are ones I've dyed.  From left to right are:  Ice-dyed, Arahsi Shibori, Itajime, three low-immersion dyed pieces (two of them more than once) with more shibori pieces above and below them.  The two commercial fabrics are the one highest up in the center and the one furthest to the right, going off the edge of the photo.