August RAFA !

I had to show off my three visors that I dye painted with the thickened dyes yesterday! So Gail, which one do you want (if any)?

It was great to finally see some of the pieces that were made at QBL. RAFA members took classes from Rosalie Dace, Leslie Riley, Jeannette DiNicolas-Meyer and Elin Noble. These first two pieces were from Rosalie's second week class called Earth, Wind and Fire I believe. Janet did the first one and Caris Burton did the one below. Neither is finished but awesome starts and they had great little studies with them as well.

Caris also showed her first attempt at Deconstructed Screen Printing which I think is awesome!! She learned it from a book rather than a class. She does everything well!!

Caren Betlinski shared her piece from the first week at QBL with Rosalie Dace. This week focused on circles. Priscilla also did a series of three pieces which were awesome and which you can see on her blog. They are much bigger looking in person than on the blog.

The folks who took Elin Noble's Indigo dyeing class will have their pieces for the next meeting. Some others decided they were only going to bring in finished pieces!

Our afternoon work session was led by our own Diane Miller who has a well established reputation as a knitter as well as a vendor of hand dyed yarns. She was kind enough to share with us her techniques of using MX dyes using citric acid instead of soda ash for protein based fibers (wool and silk). She also had examples and thoughts about other acid dyes (including Kool Aid!). In this picture, one of the class members is painting her skein of wool yarn with the dyes after they had been soaking in a citric acid solution. Amazingly, even without heat, the yarn just sucked up the colors. Diane uses a much lower concentration when using the MX dyes in acid dyeing (1 %). It was great information. She said she will be posting instructions on her blog which I have listed her for your ease of use!

http://dianem.wordpress.com/

It was nice to be back with the RAFA members although I did go on a bit of a rant about the forbidding of photography at Quilting by the Lake. I should explain that I don't mind that I personally can't take photos (although I won't go because of that), I rant because I think it is a dumb idea and still won't get the affect that they want! People will always take pictures, even when told not to (they will sneak out their cell phones these days) or use their binoculars or some other tiny camera. Most people like myself just want to give a little good publicity to a person or a venue that they enjoyed and respect personal positions. Many people will be turned off by the fact that they can't study even for their own personal use quilts that they liked (although I guarantee that there were people taking pictures and publishing them).

Thank goodness I chose to buy a camera rather than spending it on the QBL the class I was going to take! Next year, I will take the money I would have spent (I went for ten years) and go to Yellowstone again maybe!