Making Up For Lost Time -- But First the Houses and Some Current Stuff!

I finally finished the three Habitat for Humanity tops which I will quilt when I get back down south as the club provides me with batting.  These are the three.  The first two have 2 small trees and one wide one and the third ones has 2 wide ones and 1 small one in each row.  I randomly made trees until I ran out of fabric so wanted to use what I had.  I did have to make a couple of more trees to complete that quilt though.

 

In trying to destash, I came across a bunch of mandalas I did a few years ago.  I am planning to sell a bunch of my hand dyes and mandalas at our club garage sale in June -- I will be selling them super cheap and probably donating the rest that I don't sell.  These are all 45 x 45 inches.  These were some of the first ones I tried with ice dyeing quite a few years ago.

This afternoon I decided it was time to start putting together the Farmer's Wife blocks that I did.  I have two sets of close to 100 each.  I decided I would put half in point and half as is and started the process this afternoon.  There was A LOT of trial and error trying to decide what size to cut the half square triangles and then what size to make the borders on the regular blocks.  I guessed wrong a number of times.  The blocks will be 8 x 8 inches when finished.  Without the borders, they are 6 1/2 x 6 1/2.  The half squaree triangles were made from 5 1/2 in squares and the borders will need to be 1 in wide finished or 1 1/2 inch strips.  I can't begin to tell you how many times I did this simple task wrong.  Should have done it at the beginning of sewing, not at the end!

Tomorrow and the next couple of days will be pictures of quilts from my last Genesee Valley Quilt Club Meeting.

Some New Ice Dyed Pieces

This is an arrangement of nine of the 12 small pieces that I did using the grass green, ultraviolet and basic blue.  They were all a little dark for my taste although they were pretty evenly dyed.  I should have used some yellow in these but thought the very light grass green would work.  I usually stack them a bit deeper as well.  I don't think there were more than a couple piled on top of one another this time, so there were six or seven of the small pieces, one larger one and two drop cloths for each of the two bins.  Usually I have 2 large, 2 drop cloths and 12 to 16 of the small pieces which eats up a bit more dye.

 This and the next piece are both the 23 x 23 inch pieces.  There was one in each batch.

 The next few were the smaller pieces and I thought were the better of the bunch because they were a little lighter.  I do like the ultra-violet and will use that color again.  It is a pre-mixed dye which I tend to shy away from and have used blue-violet in the past but think I like this purple better even than the pure color grape.

The next four were my "drop" clothes.  This was a top layer one.

This was on top of the accordion folded ones pictured below (and my favorites as well).

I think this is a bottom.

Another top with the color clearly delineated.

 These last four were easily my favorites of the day.  I have had a terrible time trying to get even folds on larger  pieces of fabric so did four fat quarters for a start to see how they would do with the technique I planned to use.  The technique was to according fold and then twist around and set them standing up as I suspected that I would get the most even color this way.  I also applied the dyes in stripes across the buncles rather than the random spoonfuls I used on the other two bins.

More from the Last Dyeing Batch -- the Small Pieces

I decided to photograph the pieces in groups of nine from now on as I think it shows them off better.  This is the first grouping of the Intense Blue/Strongest Red/Sun Yellow batch.  My process (or lack there of) is to randomly pile the pieces on top of one another on the grids so I never know what I am going to come up with.  I am super pleased that I am getting so much differentiation of color on these relatively small pieces.  I tried to be selective with the dropping of the spoonfuls of dye.  As you can see from all the orange and green, the yellow spreads a lot and that was the third dye I laid down.

 There were 22 in the primary pile and 26 in the blue pile.  I tried to do even amounts but great care is obviously not in my genes.  I also was lazy and didn't clean the plastic tubs or the grids before this bunch and I paid the price in some of the small blue ones which have spots of red on them.  I am already planning ways to use them!!  A friend told me a long time ago that "dye dogs" are just golden opportunities and I truly believe that!!

The second piece on the top row is the only piece in the primary batch that I wasn't crazy about!!

You can see the renegade dye on the second piece in the top row!

The following are just closeup of some of my favorites from this last bunch.  Be warned -- there are a lot of them.  It will be hard to give any of them up!!