Dolores Quilts

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

cleaning and dyeing

This morning I hung up my fabric that sat all night in soda ash and alum.

Then I started boiling the fungi. While I waited I cleaned up and organized the garage. I even made a space to set up my dye experiments. No more kitchen mess!


More than 1/2 way finished

workspace for dyeing

fungus 1 cooling so it can be chopped up more

Fungus 2 boilimg

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Dyeing with Fungi

Here are some pictures of the fungi I found today. The first one is part of some fungi growing from the side of our hackberry tree.

The second is from a stump in my neighbors yard. I went to ask them about scraping lichen and fungi from their woodpile and they helped me pull these off one of their tree stumps in.

Now I am souring the fabric in hot water with soda ash and alum. I will let these soak all night and then hand to dry, before dyeing them. I will be testing with the following ingredients added to the dye: salt, vinegar, lemon juice, alum, cream of tartar, ammonia. Can't wait to try this. Will work outside with old pots and the heat base for the turkey fryer.

Dyeing Garden

My flower garden is dying, but that didn't stop me from using the dried materials to dye some fabric. This was just a simple experiment. I packed some small baby food jars with plant materials, poured warm water over them, stuffed a small piece of PFD fabric in the jars and sealed them. Then I let them sit 2 weeks on my front porch. No mordants or anything else was used. Most of these were very weak as my rain deprived and neglected garden had little to yield. The coreopsis seed heads turned the water a lovely yellow shade right away. The cloth was dark yellow until rinsed, then it was very pale. I believe if I boiled the ingredients instead of only setting them in sun and used some mordants results would be stronger. Here are the sample pieces. I am going to make them into a quilted journal cover for my natural dye notes.

The images below show samples and what was used as well as the original cloth color.

Library Mural

Here are a few pictures of the murals I painted this summer for our new county library.

Monday, September 13, 2010

God's Grace is Finished

God's Grace

Close up 1

close up 2

Where have all My NeedlesGone?

I was looking at the nice wall chart i made for all my needles to help me tell which ones were which and realized I was down to only a few. I tend to free-motion quilt with my fingers very close the foot and often break needles. Needless to say this is not very safe.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

StudioQuilts-GoldilocksAndFriends -Bookmark exchange

These are the book-markers I made for September's bookmark exchange for Studio Quilts. The theme had to do with reading. They are raw edge applique overlaid with mesh. The backgrounds are hand dyed. On the reverse I free-motion quilted the following "Good books, like good art, inspire us. I hope the others enjoy their book markers.

ART CLOTH by Jane Dunnewold

I have been so busy, I never got a chance to mention that I won the Art Cloth give away. It is a fabulous book. Very inspirational. I also bought the new book Eco Colour, It is an interesting read. I would have liked some more specific dye recipes, but I was inspired. My front porch now contains twelve small jars packed with an assortment of flowers, bark, and leaves and a 2 by 8 test strip of fabric in each. I am just experimenting to see if the items give color or not. The hard part is to wait a few weeks for the sun to work its magic. There are other better ways of dyeing, but with the hot dry weather my garden didn't have the best of plants to pick over.
Eco Colour Book