Preparing for Shibori Dyeing Day!

Well, finally back from North Carolina and getting ready for a two day dyeing session at a friend's house. We will have about 10 intrepid dyers gathering by her barn with poles and clamps in hand. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate and we won't run out of water before the two days are through -- who needs showers anyway...

The preparation consists of getting all the dyes together along with some measuring cups and spoons. Because we are doing regular immersion dyeing this day, we will also need A LOT of salt. While in North Carolina, I found quite a bit on grocery shelves. It is difficult to find the uniodized salt in any appreciable quantity around here except at the Mennonite run bulk food stores. Hopefully with the 50 lbs I have gathered we will have enough. You don't need the salt when doing our regular low water immersion dyeing although I do use a little! I also have scoured the local stores for sodium carbonate which we will need to get the pH right. A lot of the local stores carry sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) instead of sodium carbonate (washing soda) as their pH+ for pools so watch your labels carefully!

I have gathered pvc pipe in 2 to 4 foot lengths with many different diameters (Lowe's even has the hard to find 6" pipe now) around which I will wrap and scrunch fabric. I even found some nice deep 5 gallon pails at Lowes today.

To get the best results, it is best not to try to scrunch more than a fat half yard of fabric at a time (a fat half is a full yard cut in half lengthwise). You really want to have a fairly even look to the whole piece (IMHO).

I have also gathered a lot of clamps (the kind you squeeze with your hands) in different sizes which I will use to clamp the fabric between two pieces of plexiglas that I have cut down to reasonable (3" x 4") size. I found a lot of very small clamps at Harbor Freight which will do the trick nicely and not take up so much room in the "pots".

Tomorrow will be spent taking the fabric, labelling it appropriately and scrunching, wrapping and squeezing it! I may even do some hand stitching tonight as that leads to some very intriguing patterns that you can't obtain any other way.

A Visit to Wilmington NC

Lisa had to work at the Cape Fear factory of her company on Thursday and Friday. She is training staff on their productivity initiatives. We all decided it would be a great time to follow her down to Wilmington and see what it was like as we have seriously thought about another house in this area.

It was great fun to see this enormous chemical plant in the middle of nowhere basically. They even have a place to shower your cars as you leave. Doesn't make you want to live there for sure. It is not in Wilmington though. After lunch, we headed to our motel and then onward to Wrightsville beach which is about a five mile drive from where we stayed and just across the waterway from Wilmington. It is probably the nicest East Coast beach we have seen!! There are big wide beaches and beautiful homes on this small island. Too bad the homes we liked were about $3.5 million though! Guess we won't be buying right on the beach. Wilmington is a very charming little city very much like Savannah so it did appeal to us a great deal so we shall see. Housing is still affordable here and a winter home might be in order. Summer is the high season here but it would be too hot for me. The water temp the last two days has been 82 degrees which surprised me for this early in the year. It was like Florida water!





A view down the beach at Carolina Beach where we went on Saturday.
Of course Warren and Lisa doing the beach relaxation thing!













Unfortunately, we head back to Charlotte today and then back home on Monday. We have really enjoyed our little break at the beach.

Warren versus the Raccoon or the Charlotte Adventures

This is Lisa's front door and up above is her uninvited guest's front door which is now blocked with a piece of tile and bricks.




Well, truthfully, the raccoon is gone, but the damage she wrought is still apparent! We arrived in Charlotte with the temps near 100 not knowing whether the air conditioning would be fully functional when we arrived! Lisa had tried it a couple of nights before after spotting a significant amount of damage to the air conditioning insulation in her crawl space. Thank goodness is does work!

But to back up, a couple of months ago Lisa heard a lot of commotion in her crawl space. A chance peak up a couple of days later and she was face to face with a large raccoon. She called a number of exterminators to get prices on raccoon removal. The critter had eaten a foot sized hole in her siding to get in! Unfortunately, she moved too slowly because her uninvited visitor gave birth during the next week. Having had experience with raccoon mothers before, she knew it would move out in a couple of months so she put up with the noise. Last week she looked again in the crawl space and noticed that the air conditioning ducts appeared to be ripped to shreds by her visitors. Fortunately it was just the insulation. Warren replaced that a couple of nights ago and is now putting a permanent fix to her siding to prevent similar incursions next year. Lisa will have to keep a very close eye on her wooden siding to make sure it isn't being chewed on.


Lisa is doing the only thing possible in this hot weather. Taking a little nap curled up on her sofa with a good book. Unfortunately, her kitties thought this was a wonderful time to cuddle up and keep her warm!


It is hotter by the day here though. Yesterday the temp measured 104 on Lisa's car thermometer (outside temp) and today it was 110 on my friend Janice's car thermometer. The official high temp (although record breaking) was only 99 though! I know it is just as hot at home though so that is a little compensation. We are heading to the beach on Thursday and the weather is supposed to break before then.




Lisa's kitties, Paka and Yahi have been constant entertainment. Yahi is a ham who loves having his picture taken(see how beautiful my long fur is) and Paka is the sphinx.

Ode to the Internet - My Online Friends

It has been between 12 and 14 years since I first met some friends on the internet and we have written to each other ever since! We initially met through an online list dedicated to Singer Featherweights which all of us collected at the time. We also collected all sorts of other sewing machines. We soon found out that we had a shared interest in quilting as well. Those conversations grew through the years as we "listened" to the problems with children and watched them grow up in some cases before our internet "eyes". We are now watching the grandchildren grow.



As in all groups of friends, we have all done things that have annoyed and irritated others in the group at one time or another. We have had several people leave the group a number of years ago (moves, wonderful and horrific changes in life etc.) but the core of six of us has remained pretty steady for the last 10 years. I will post some pictures on another post as they are not on this computer.

However, one of the group has rediscovered her interest in art after many years of concentrating on her role as wife and mother. She started doing some painting and working in pastels and asked for permission to use some of my bird photos. I thought I would show you one of her most recent works. She is hopefully going to get together a full body of work so she can present to local (New Hampshire) galleries. I think she shows some real talent and hope she is successful in this newest venture.



This is one of my favorite Great Blue Heron pictures that I took at Ft. Myers Beach last December.


This is the oil pastel that my friend Linda Heminway made. I think she captured his majesty well!
This is another of her oil pastels of a chickadee. I believe this one is currently in a local gallery in New Hampshire.
And yet another one -- this time of a bluebird.

May RAFA Meeting

The hour before the meeting was spent going through the hundreds of molas that Priscilla brought back from Panama on her last trip. I had seen them before but they really leave me breathless! There were so many stunning ones. It is important to support Priscilla here so she will return again and buy even more. She is having another jacket class in August -- this is always a good place to utilize these molas. It is good that we can support these women in Panama who in many cases are responsible for the family income.

Well, we had a meeting after that today and let that be enough said. We will not limit membership and we will support a mission and a contribution to Schweinfurth in our name.

However, there were a great many people in attendance and the show and tell was wonderful as usual. It is nice to see some of the variety that this group produces. My temptation is to try everything though! Unfortunately, I don't know everyone's name to attach to the pieces and don't have room to include all the pieces. Some people had asked for pictures so I included those in the blog and all they have to do is right click on the picture and copy it to their own computers.

This is one of Caris Burton's wonderful pieces inspired by an inlaid stone table that she saw. Her applique is flawless!


This is a doll done by a new member of the group. I know her last name is Pope and I thought her first name was Donna but I may be wrong there. It was stunning as you can see even without a nice background.


This is Linda Bachman's piece done as a part of a quilt challege for the Women's Health Partnership here in the Rochester area. This is a wonderful cause and the quilts donated will all be auctioned off in August.
This is Nancy Hick's contribution to the quilt challenge.


Barb Magin finished this piece from a class from last month.
This is the back of a quilt done as part of a gift by the group.
This is the front of the quilt. It was a wonderful arrangement of blocks and Val Schultz did a wonderful job of machine quilting it.


This is a wonderful felted piece done by our own Donna Patrick.

Another Great Day at Marcia's!

This is our clematis which is blooming like crazy this year! So many blossoms.

Warren filled a couple of our large outside planters with begonias. I love the large flowering kind and we found some really different colors this year including this pretty pink.
Well, it was a great day as usual at Marcia's. Fortunately Priscilla didn't bring anything for us to drool over this time. I decided that I was going to work on some bog coats using fabrics that I had dyed using the "drip dye" technique that Marcia's friend uses. I almost finished two bog coats but they were pretty straightforward.

Marcia thought she was going to work on her art quilts but ended up being enamored with some fabric that Priscilla brought for show and tell (it had gotten lost in her stash for some time and was now properly aged for reappearing in public again). It was a brilliantly colored gold and orange piece from Napal. Now you have to know that Priscilla has given me horrible grief about orange for a number of years now...... She was a closet orange person all along -- little did we know.

Priscilla was working on her dessert coat -- we suggested it would be ideal wear for a visit to the Cheesecake Factory.

This is my newly completed bog coat. The trim on the band is Hmong reverse applique from Laos (I believe). I have since colored in the light yellow band with a deeper golden color (aren't colored Sharpies the best thing).
This is the back of the dessert jacket with the lovely hand beaded mola.

A Mola-icious Day at Priscilla's!

This is one of my favorites with the four colorful fish.

Well, Marcia and I hadn’t gotten together with Priscilla for a few weeks so were looking forward to a day out on her new patio with her new patio furniture (she had a windfall from ONE button she sold on ebay). Priscilla has recently returned from a visit to Panama and visits to San Blas Islands and the Kuna Indians where she had purchased some awesome molas which she we got to see. The most fun are the ones she keeps for herself – no amount of wheedling and whining can get her to part with those. This was undoubtedly the most incredible collection of molas I have ever seen!! She had seen they were much better than she had ever purchased before and she was right!! The workmanship defies description. My guess is that a many of these pieces easily took a month to complete. There are probably 15-20 stitches to the inch and every bit of the surface is covered with intricate reverse appliqué – the hallmark of these pieces of artwork. And the colors.....


Priscilla graciously let us look through the ones that she had for sale. Of course we couldn’t resist although there were so many that we would have loved to have that we left behind because we just couldn’t justify the additional expense. Marcia found some horses and I found a snail (in honor of my father who was an expert on land snails and I am sure crawled around in the jungles in Panama at some point – I think he actually got one of his cases of malaria and hepatitis there). I also found a small bunny that I bought in honor of my mother.



I love the fact that these are authentic molas that were worn on garments. Priscilla had many that still had parts of garments and zippers attached. They are worn like yokes on an apron (although not an apron) with similar if not matching ones on the back and the front of the garment. Notice the white pin head at the top of this one. If you double click you can see closer. That will give you an idea of how small those pin dot reverse applique circles are on this piece -- no, those are not french knots but a tiny hole is cut and the edge appliqued under to show the fabric beneath.


This is my snail with a man riding on top. Notice all the tiny zig zag reverse applique. Most of the pieces are "landscape" style and about 14 inches by 18 inches although they vary in size quite a bit.



This probably has the most intricate applique of all of the pieces. It is a very color octopus.
I loved how colorful this was with the bird portrayed on the pitcher.




Note to self: don’t wear your brightly colored flowered shirt when you will be sitting outside with the bees!!! They chased me all over the yard.