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?