Last Day at Marcia's for Awhile

Don't know anything about mushrooms but had to snap a picture of these (and there were a lot more) growing in  a pile of mulch in our neighbor's yard.  We used to have tons of mushrooms in our yard of all sorts of variety but they really don't come back to exactly the same place year after  year.

Marcia finished the quilting on this beautiful quilt in her jet trails series.  Loved the colors in this one.

It was a great day and good to reconnect with another art quilting friend who happened to be there as well as Priscilla.  I managed to pin baste 5 full sized quilts yesterday on Marcia's big tables so was very happy about my progress.  Now I will put them into one of those big bags, vacuum out the air and take them to the beach.  It will be awhile before I get back to visit with Marcia and Priscilla but they promised to keep their blogs up to date so I wouldn't miss out on anything!

This picture was taken by Scott Veal and was of a waterspout that turned into a tornado just down the way from my beach house (our renters watched from our porch) last Thursday!!  Of course a month ago we were hit by lightening.  After the tornado, I knew a hurricane would be coming.....

Of course, my plans had to be rather drastically altered because of the Irene so all of you wish me luck!!  I am heading first to Charlotte rather than the beach (and next week instead of this one), pick up my daughter's two kitties which I will then drive down to the beach.  Hopefully all will still be standing and in livable condition.  Our house is a block from the beach with nothing between us and the water.  We had to pay someone to come in and close all our hurricane shutters (thankfully we purchased them last year and had them installed).  The storm was poised for a direct hit (as of Tues morning) but looks like we will get less impact now (although winds estimated to be 60-70 currently).  I was down there last year for 50 mph winds and I don't want to repeat that experience any time soon!  Dear husband will be holding the fort up here in Western NY.

I turned over ten comfort quilts which I completed to Marcia to turn in at our monthly GVQC meeting so that clears up some of the clutter.  Getting the other seven real quilts pin basted has organized things a bit more.  I will machine quilt them down at the beach where they will eventually live.  I now have a few more days to get things together to keep me busy!  I did manage to get to Borders and get audio tapes for 40% off for the ride down -- it makes it so much easier when you are by yourself!

Patricia's Summer Quilt Show

Well, today was the official unveiling of the Serengetti Lion quilt which I decided to have hung at Patricia's summer quilt show.  I wanted to have it done for the GVQC show but it took a long time for the machine quilting.


It was in a great place so that you could stand back and see it and I got some very nice comments.  Judging by what people were staring at, the mouth area of the male lion is the focal point!

I thought this was such a nice little quilt which an excellent use of those Laurel Birch fabrics that I love all fussy cut.  It was by Gratia Pfromm.

This was a beautiful little kalaidoscope by Cindy Merrow.  Loved the colors in it.

This was a nice variation on the traditional Drunkard's Path by Audrey Andrus.

Icicles by Lynn Hayes.  This was a beautiful use of batiks.

This was an original pattern done by Lynn Wigstone-Birch as a divorce quilt.

Of course, no day would be complete without the requisite butterfly although I did get one request that I pass on some butterflies in my blog!!  This is the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on the Butterfly Bush in my neighbor's yard.  This is her underside.


I have been madly madly machine quilting and putting binding on comfort quilts the last week.  I will have 13 done by Monday hopefully, 10 of which will get donated, 2 gifted and one for good measure to be kept for a miscellaneous baby someone is sure to have!  I still have 9 regular sized tops to machine quilt, 7 of which also need to be basted as well.


There were a lot of other nice quilts in the show but it was hard to get back far enough to photo many of these.  I definitely got some ideas!

Butterflies are Sure Difficult to Identify!

Well, after much conjecture, I think I can safely say that this is a female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly.  It looks almost identical to a western variety of swallowtail.  The male isn't as colorful and that is what most of the illustrations I found pictured.

This is a side view of the above butterfly.

This, I believe, is a Black Swallowtail but it looks a bit like the Spicebush Swallowtail as well.  Two swallowtails in one day!!  They are the prettiest of our local butterflies I think.

I also spotted the Monarch again today but it was too fast for me.  There were several of the milky white butterflies as well.  The weather has finally cooled down to very pleasant which affords me the opportunity to sit outside, read and watch for new species.

Trying to get things ready to do in NC, I have gotten together almost all my  unfinished quilts, found or made backs and cut batting.  It is a daunting task to finish all these which include:
5 disappearing four patches, 5 disappearing nine-patches (these nine are comfort quilts to be donated), 4 one block wonders (at least double bed sized), 2 random unfinished tops, and the three quilts I made from the strips.  I know that there are at least three other tops stashed somewhere as well as my basket quilt and my Baltimore Album which needs an appliqued border.  So, what does one do?  I think this one will buy myself a midarm as soon as I hit NC so that I can machine quilt these suckers quickly!!  Several of them are destined for beds down there anyway.

These are the beautiful flowers that my dear husband got me for my birthday this week.  I love orchids, Birds of Paradise and orchids so these were all included.  I do love my birthday flowers each year.  They are always all the exotic varieties that I love!

August RAFA Meeting - Lots of Class Pieces and a Slow Photographer

A number of people at RAFA this week brought in the pieces that they had created in the mono printing demonstration/mini-workshop that I did last month.  I got a lot of positive feedback and a few who said they would be doing more of this.  This was one of Patty's pieces.

Joyce is a nationally  known wearable artist and she had already taken her mono printed fabrics and put them together into a new vest.

Janet must have brought in six or seven pieces to share.  This was from her  recent week long class with Katie Pasquini-Mausopust.  The students painted canvases, cut into the various canvas pieces and then recombined with commercial fabrics.  Janet's were stunning.  She is incredibly prolific as well as a very intuitive designer.

Priscilla also took this class and had a couple of pieces but she moved much too quickly for this photographer.  Hers were beautiful and she loved the class!

Two of the people in the meeting had also tried the ice cube and powdered MX dye technique illustrated in the most recent Quilting Arts magazine.  This is the results of Elaine's efforts -- a stunning piece.  I was a little concerned about this article when I saw it as I feel so strongly that you should always use a mask when working with the powdered dyes and sprinkling over a large surface is just asking for trouble but the results were spectacular. People often think that wearing a mask is just for the overly cautious and don't.  I am not a cautious person for the most part but this and wearing a chemical mask when working with Chlorox are two of my hot buttons.  I would think that using a very high concentration of liquid dyes would work just as well.

The Butterfly Bush is in Bloom and the Butterflies are Back!

Warren's garden is really beautiful this year.  It seems to like all the sunshine we have had and the petunias and marigolds are extremely full and add lots of color to the yard.

This was one of the new additions to the garden this year -- a perennial hibiscus with blossoms that are at least 9 inches across.  We have them in this vibrant fuchsia and also a lovely  light pink.

This is a side view of a White Viceroy butterfly -- one I had seen before but hadn't gotten a picture.

This is the back view of the above Viceroy.  You can see the blue on the edges on the back and his prominent white stripes.

This is actually a Monarch and I believe it is the first one I have gotten a picture of!!  I have seen the Painted Ladies and lots of Gulf Fritteries.  This is the side view.

This was definitely a very hard picture to get as most of the time this butterfly had his wings folded up.  I must have just clicked in the split second he opened them up in this shot.  All the butterflies are sitting on my neighbor's butterfly bushes.

This is a butterfly called a Skipper (I don't know which one  yet as there are a lot of skipper varieties) but they are fast moving and only
about an inch long.

When George Lets Me, I Do Some Piecing....

George was actually behaving in this shot and giving me a few inches to work.  The minute DH leaves the house, George bounds up to the sewing room and won't stop pestering me  until I pick him up and put him on my shoulder where he purrs and rubs and literally puts his paws around my neck.  He will keep this up for half an hour and won't hear of being put down.  Eventually he retires to a place near the sewing machine, cleans up and then goes to sleep.  The second Warren opens the door downstairs, he wakes up and heads out of the room -- very fickle.

This is the first of the quilt tops I made from the strips that I cut.  I decided that I would make a quilt for the beach house instead of comfort quilts with this bunch as I liked the colors and it was taking a bit more labor than I like to put into quilts to give away (like the disappearing 9-patches).  It is actually 72 inches by 81 inches so will fit on a queen sized bed or smaller.

This is the second top made out of the same pile of strips.  Basically five 2 1/2 strips were sewn together and then cut diagonally which produces two different types of triangles.  So each 10 1/2 inch square produces 2 of each type to triangle.  You can usually get 4 squares from each strip but not always.  I had a bunch that only got the three squares so I cut up the rest into 4 1/2 inch wide strips and that is what is between the triangles in this top which is going very fast as opposed to the top one.  This is about 1/4 of the finished size.  There will be the white strip in the middle gradating out to the dark yellow orange on either side.  It is a very graphic looking quilt and I should have enough blocks to make a couple which I can use in the room with the twin beds.  I do like to have nice quilts on all the beds ---- and there are a lot of beds in the beach house (7 at last count!).

The above is a collage of several fabrics I did with the leftover dyes.  I did add navy blue into the mix as well as I like mixing intense blue and navy blue with both fuchsia and yellow -- gives a little more variety to the surface.  Each piece is 1/4 of a 2 yard piece.

I also did an additional couple of long sleeved tshirts using just the navy and intense blue dyes.  I do like those two dyes mixed together.  IMHO, navy blue is a pretty "clear" color as is intense blue.


I think I may be done dyeing for a bit but still have a few tshirts left sitting sadly white so they may find themselves immersed before monthend.


I have to start thinking about what projects I am going to be taking down to NC.  As design is the most time consuming in the pictoral quilts that I do, that may be the direction I go in.  I will have to take some sewing to do as I rarely go through a week without sewing.

Still Using Up the Leftover Dyes...

It is amazing how long these dyes are lasting.  I basically made a quart ea. of 3 colors -- blue, yellow and fuchsia in a 10% (only 6% for the fuchsia) solution for the monoprinting demo 10 days ago. (Note:  I use 10% solutions as it makes the math so easy for determining depth of shade -- 10 ml of solution will contain 1 gm of dye powder)  In the past, it has become obvious that the higher concentrations do stay unbonded with the water a lot longer -- maybe because of the dye to water ratio.  Anyway, I have now done (in addition to what was used in class) 8 t-shirts, 6 yards of wide cotton knit and four yards of my Egyptian cotton.  I still have half a quart of the yellow and fuchsia left and about 1 1/2 cups of the blue.  Wow!  And the best part is that I really like the colors that these three dyes produce together (sun yellow, intense blue and fuchsia).  They are all the brighter of the pure dye colors (turquoise is probably the brightest though and I haven't used any of that this time). 

This particular combination  is not one of Carol Soderlund's trios of colors  that she uses in her Dye Mixing class (which I highly recommend to anyone who has a serious interest in  controlled dyeing) but I did do many other combinations after I left the class to see what I could come up with - and this was one that I really liked.  I found that using fuchsia and turquoise together in low water immersion in anything but very low concentrations yielded too much separation of color as fuchsia is the fastest bonding and turquoise the slowest.  Maybe I will scan in some of my other results and do a blog on that....


My technique for the last bunch of dyeing is a little different from what I usually do.  I have pre-soaked all the fabric or t-shirts in a warm soda ash solution (dyeing in my basement and even in the summer, this is a necessity).  I then use those plastic tubs used for washing dishes that you find at the dollar store and put two tshirts or four yards of fabrics spread out very evenly across the bottom of each. I then make up cup solutions of about 2% solutions (I know that 20 ml of dye solution will yield 2 gms of dye which will dye 100 gms of fabric to a depth of shade of 2% or medium and then I just add water up to the cup level) of each of the colors (or whichever of the colors I am using) and then I kind of pour them all over, one at a time, smashing the fabric after each addition so that I maximize the distribution of the dye immediately.  I have been really going very, very light on the fuchsia even in its reduced concentration probably never using even a 1% solution as it overpowers very quickly.  The fabrics aren't sitting in big puddles and I figured I would use the timing for dye painting (4-8 hours) rather than the usual low water immersion time (1 hour).  So far, I have been spectacularly pleased with the results.  Some are almost as nice as my snow dyed fabrics.  With consistent 90 degree temps around here, we won't be seeing much of that for a while!  I may play a bit with salt dyeing though and try something a little different -- we shall see.... Turquoise, however,  is the best for this!

This was my very favorite of the fabrics I dyed although I don't think the subtlety can be seen in this image of the two yard piece.  It will be enough for a tshirt for me!

Last but not least are the socks.  I am getting smarter and dyeing them in batches so that I have many of the same colorway so that matching and losing socks is not such a problem!!  They will match my t-shirts as well.  These brightly colored socks even get a laugh from my daughters (after the eye roll of course).