The Brown Tote and More Progress!

I have piles of 2 1/2 inch brown strips, a bunch of which I used for the last quilt.  I am going to give them away.  I have a pattern for a tote that uses the kinds of strips from which I made a rug a couple of years ago.  I always cut up leftover batting and tried to give that away but no one wanted it so I decided to give the pattern a try.  I had bought it when I won a jelly roll of beautiful batiks figuring I would use them.  I hated to use them before testing the pattern out.  I just started sewing the batting in the strips and then sewing them together.  The pattern called for 40 strips so that is what I did.  It was quite soothing.  I wasn't in the mood to baste baby quilts and needed something different to do.

Here is a bunch of strips sewn together.  I started using tape to keep them straight as the middle was beginning to bow a bit!  The tape worked well so will be using that again.

Here is the bag with the sides sewn together and a pleat in the bottom so that there is some depth to the bag.  I trimmed off all the extra as the strips were all different lengths.

Here I have added the band around the top.  The instructions were not very good on the pattern for how to join the band but I winged it and it is okay.

I decided to just use two more of the strips as the handles and that worked just fine although I will put an additional row of stitching the next time I do it.  It measures about 18 x 18 and is about 6 inches deep.  That is bigger than the pattern shows but she had you cut it down more which seemed like a waste to me.  It stands up by itself but is a little beefy!  I may do another one as it did substantially decrease my stash of the strips of batting!!  You can actually see a little drop in the bag of brown strips as well!

Making progress on the Passacaglia quilt as well.  Working on the next rosette now.  Not sure just how much I will do or how I would fill in areas.

I finished a couple of baby quilt tops with strips I had cut out some time ago but had to supplement them.  They are tops in the these pictures but I basted and machine quilted them today.  Still have a little to go with some free hand quilting on this one.  

It took a couple of afternoons to iron all that fabric!  I also over-dyed the very green looking black with green.  A couple in the gradation of grays were okay so didn't dye them all.  Realized after the fact that I had done a gradation of the new blue a couple of months ago so may overdye that blue as well at some point.

 

Some Dyeing Results and Miscellaneous Updates of In Process Projects

The brown quilt top is finally completed and is a good size at 56 x 70.

The first block in the Passacaglia quilt is finished!

I spent the day dyeing with my friend Dianne and had decided to do something quite mundane but necessary for my further education!  I just did gradations of some colors I hadn't done straight gradations of before.  From left to right are Pro Chem Blue 420 which is a new pure color.  Second is Black 402a - Cotton Black, and next is Black 604 - New Black.  I started with 8% for the blue and 10% for the blacks.  I had a lot of leakage in the bags so am a little uncertain about those darkest colors.  The Cotton black tended to green in the darkest shades and did look like gray in the lighter shades so will be good for shading colors.  The New Black was definitely tending toward blue in all shades!  I will be overdyeing the blacks most likely although I have decided with what yet!!

 

This was an attempt to get a redder red by mixing Mixing Red with Strong Orange -- both pure colors.  I did four parts red to orange and is still came out more coral than red in the darker shades (8%).  I don't have any pinks in my stash so will keep these as is.

I still have a lot of pfd fabric but we are planning another marathon dye/overdye session where we use 10 colors to come up with 35 different results!!  That will definitely put a dent in my stash of pfd fabrics!!