More Progress on the Batik Mini-Sampler

Well, I have gotten impossibly efficient at making Seminole strips so almost have enough to go around the batik mini-sampler. It will be a bit of a challenge to get them JUST the right length for each section though!! I already took off the outside borders because I was afraid that I had inadvertently added a couple of inches to the sides. I also decided that I didn't want them as wide as they were.




These last two pictures are of the current state of Donna's jacket. The colors are perfect for her and she is busily adding more glitz which is her trademark!



Marcia's jacket is definitely getting glitzier as well with the addition of the red trim and the black and silver trim. This will be an elegant jacket when finished!

April Meeting of Genesee Valley Quilt Club

We had a wonderful speaker today at quilt club and one of my fellow club members was more than willing to give up her spot in the Saturday class (she thought she had signed up for the Friday class) so I signed up just to see more of this marvelous artist. Her name is Lura Schwartz Smith and she had one of her quilts in the 100 top quilts of the 20th century. I know you would recognize it -- it looked like a Degas. She is teaching classes on working with inks and drawing so even though I am not particularly interested, I thought I would give it a try as Diane was not happy about not being able to attend on a Saturday. I also signed up for an origami class next Friday taught by one of the quilt club members and I am looking forward to that as well.



This was I believe Carol Spreter's beautiful quilt. She said she was in a "finishing up" mode as well.


This is again the Christmas stack and whack all bound and hung at show and tell. Now what to do with it!


This is the other stack and whack that is all finished. I used some of the hand dyed fabric Marcia and I had dyed the week before for the binding -- it was perfect as the colors in this quilt were really odd and there was nothing like them in any of the shops -- it was almost impossible to find the border fabrics a couple of years ago even.




I loved this quilt by Pat Berardi where she incorporated pictures on fabric as well as fabric she bought on her cruise/tour of Alaska (a couple of months before we took ours!).



These were several projects done by one Genesee Valley quilter from the class she took with Anne Lullo the month before. I love what she did with the bag that the local Wegmans is using for groceries!



Well, here is my one and only Las Vegas picture!! It is a picture taken of me standing in front of the Bell helicopter that I took out over the Grand Canyon. I was the only American on the helicopter -- even the pilot was French Canadian! All the rest were Canadians, some of whom didn't speak much English. It was a wonderful experience and I wish I had all the photos I took on the ride which was very cool.

Two More Quilts Almost Done!

Well, I am still mourning the loss of my camera but have spent quite a bit of time on the internet deciding what to buy next. The newer version of my camera is $400 less and has more features!! I am almost sold on getting that one but will wait for a bit as there may be an even newer version out before too long. In the meantime I resurrected my old Kodak and it is serviceable for quilt pictures but not much else!!



Well, my friend Teddy Ahern called me yesterday to tell me that the last of the three quilts I gave her to machine quilt were ready to be picked up. This first one was done many years ago using a nice Christmas poinsetta print and my hand dyed fabrics for the sashing.


This is a closeup of the quilting so hopefully you can see the poinsetta's that Teddy quilted into the quilt.


This is the second of the stack and whacks to get done. I have the main fabric in a different color that I loved but decided to do this one first in this colorway (not my favorite) to see how I would like the look of the fabric with the stack and whack technique. Now, I have taken the oath to do no more stack and whacks so the nicer one may never get done!!

I have no idea what I am going to do with either of these two quilts. They both are about double bed size but could be used as lap quilt I suppose. Neither of my kids is a big stack and whack fan. I still have to do the binding which is one of my favorite parts of quilting!!

Grand, Grander, Grandest!!!

Well, let me start by saying that NONE of these pictures were taken by me but are pretty identical to pictures I did take. The reason I couldn't use my own (and some of mine were better!) is that I managed to lose my beloved camera on my sleep deprived arrival in Atlanta. That put quite a damper on an otherwise fantastic 4 day vacation in Las Vegas and the surrounding area!



This is a picture of the snail all done up in flowers in the Conservatory at the Bellagio, my very favorite of all the mega resorts out there on the Strip. The gardens were beautiful with all sorts of huge glass poppies hanging from the top to accent the flowers which were beautiful. The lobby was filled with vases of flowers as well. It was a lovely place!!



This is a picture of the incredible water show that is done every half hour at the Bellagio all day and evening. I was there and had pictures for both day and night -- stunning!! A real high point of the trip for me. This is looking toward the Bellagio (although I never saw this view at night only during the day).


This is the view that I had of the evening show. The Eiffel Tower is across the street at Paris and is beautiful all lit up and as a backdrop for the wonderful light and water show.
This is a duplicate of one of my shots from Hoover Dam looking up at Lake Mead. The white line along the canyon wall (the Black Canyon, by the way) is where the high point of the water was. It is in a severe drought (we saw that when we stayed there last summer) and the water is down more than 100 feet. The water was blue and green in the very foreground. These are two of the intake towers. We took the whole power plant tour as well and walked over the Dam. Beautiful area!!




This is the Grand Canyon at Mathers Point and also a duplicate of a shot I took. After I lost my camera my neighbor said that he was sure a million people had taken my shots as well from the same place which is why I have included these wonderful anonymous shots found on Picasa!

A real highlight of the trip for me was a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon!! I had never been on a helicopter before and it was wonderful -- not the least bit scary. Of course after I signed up I was a bit apprehensive!! What fun!!!

In addition to all the touring we managed to get in a Cirque Du Soleil show (Mystere) which was beyond fantastic!!! We were in the second row and were part of the show several times as the performers come out in the audience. The athletes are beyond belief and the choreography is wonderful. Definitely worth the price!! We also managed to FINALLY see the Bodies show which we just kept missing at several other cities (including Rochester).

Any typos should be blamed on the very little sleep I have gotten in the last 24 hours.

Gradation Dyeing with Procion MX Fiber Reactive Dyes

This is the pile of fabrics I got using yesterday's methods for overdyeing. Can't remember right off which one it is!

Well, you could probably use this gradation dyeing method with about any kind of dye but I use it with my Procion MX dyes. It is based on a method that I first learned way back in 1992 at a class taught by Don Wiener at Pro Chem. Elin Noble was supposed to teach the class but she became very ill at this time with what turned out to be a very severe case of Lyme Disease.

Anyway, I do this using low water immersion methods. I usually do an 8 step gradation for the deepest colors (navy, intense blue) and a 6 step for some of the lighter colors (turquoise, basic blue).

May I start by saying that I always look at color two different ways -- one is the actual color itself (blue, blue/green, yellow/orange etc.) and one is the concentration of the color (.05% or 6%). So when doing the gradations, you can pick any color (either a manufactured "pure" color or a mixture of pure colors). For illustration purposes, assume that there will be one yard of fabric weighing about 100 gms in each dyepot (in this case I use gallon sized zip locked bags -- only the good ones which I use over and over again - I like the baggies better than other containers because you can message them so easily).

I make one cup (250 ml about) with 10-12 gms (about 2 tsps) of dye. I then add a cup of water to that to make 2 cups. I arrange the baggies in a tray, each with one cup of water with 1 tbsp of salt (optional). I start with the baggie furthest from me in the tray and add one cup of the two cups of dye. I then fill the 2 cup container back to two cups. I go to the next bag closest to me, put one cup of the new more diluted dye in and then repeat the adding water step. This is repeated through all the baggies. You will have one cup of diluted color at the end. I then put the fabric in each baggie starting from the one closest to me. I message the baggie to make sure the dye gets all through the dry fabric. I smoosh the bags several times during the next 15 minutes. At the end of the 15 minutes, I add a cup of soda ash water to each baggie starting at the front again (lightest to darkest). I message the bag very thoroughly, get as much air out as I can and close the baggie up. I do this for each bag. During the next 15 minutes, I will frequently message the bags but then won't touch them the last 45. If I want more mottling, I will not message as much but I do want to get the soda ash throughout as I hate white spots or pale spots. After an hour, wash out.

A variation on the above that I really enjoy is using one color as a gradation so that you have different intensities in each baggie as above. Instead of using the plain cup of water though, I will make up a second color (say yellow) in a 2% solution and add one cup of this solution to each baggie. You will get a nice gradation that moves from one color through a series of colors sometimes to another color. For those of you who have had Carol Soderlund's class, you kind of get the rows or columns in her book. It is a little tricky to figure out the concentrations of each color but a little arithmetic and you are all set! You will love the results of this one!



Forgive these being un-ironed!! The left side is a gradation of greys using a no longer produced mix from ProChem called Mixing Grey. I have achieved almost the same color using navy blue and orange in a 2:1 ratio. The one on the right hand side is one where I used a navy blue gradation but added a constant 2% solution of a mix of yellow and mixing red.

Extreme Overdyeing -- Dyeing with Procion MX dyes

Well, a very fruitful day of dyeing -- a little like getting back on a horse after a long absence. My back is killing me and I am tired but I have a big pile of newly dyed fabric to admire and pet. And then, what to do with it next. Of course, usually I would be right down in the basement dyeing more and more (I tend to go on dye binges dyeing perhaps 200 yards of fabric in a week). However, this time - like last year - I am heading out west again for a short trip to Las Vegas to meet up with friends for a few days.



Anyway, for those of you well versed in different dyeing techniques, my version of overdyeing is based loosely on what Katy Widger did with her sequenced overdyeing where she took fabric through two sets of dye baths, each one a gradation from light to dark of one color. I did several of these early on in my dyeing career but wasn't overenthusiastic about the range of colors I got with this. It was okay but I wanted yardage and I wanted to experiment efficiently with overdyeing. So my version I will call Extreme Overdyeing as you will get 35 different colors of all about the same value (depending on the colors you choose) with just ten dyepots. 10 of these are the colors from each of the dyepots and 25 are the overdyes.

This is the worksheet I create before each time we do the overdyeing.


The theory (hope you can follow this) is that you put six yards of fabric into each of 5 different color dyepots (say sun yellow, golden yellow, mixing red, fuchsia, strong orange -- all Procion "pure" colors). You can use either regular immersion or low water immersion for this. I prefer low water immersion. After you batch these for their prerequisite hour or so, you rinse them out, wash them and then sort them into a second set of piles. These piles are created by first eliminating one yard from each of the five colors and setting those aside (and calling them finished).



Then you take one yard from each of the pots in the first step (so you would have one of yellow, one golden, one red, one fuchsia and one strong orange) and put into the first pot of the second set of pots (say basic blue, intense blue, navy blue, blue/violet, turquoise). You do this for each of those five pots. Then you add in an additional yard of white fabric into the pots so again you have six yards in each pot. (Of course you will have labelled everything ahead of time!!) Repeat the first step and you will come out with a wide variety of colors (of course my example would yield probably every green you can think of). I use 2% solutions for each of my two steps so that the final colors all have an intensity of about 4%. Varying the intensity would of course yield different colors as well and sometimes I will have one pot with 2% and one with 3% of the same color just to see the difference.



My friend Marcia and I have gotten together several times and done a series of these. One time we overdyed bright colors with browns, one time with all the different blacks and greys, and one time we just took warm colors and overdyed them with cool colors. We generally use "pure" (pure means that they are not created mixes) colors for one step and either pure or mixed colors for the second to try to keep mud to a minimum. It was a great way to see how the new grape and boysenberry pure colors interacted with a wide variety of other colors.




This was one of our overdyes where we used either premanufactured browns or made our own browns using colors we had made in Carol Soderlund's dyeing class (the one where you get 4500 swatches).



Here is one where we tried all the different pure Procion MX blues over the different pure warm colors.


Here is one where we just tried different colors in each batch to see how they would interact with each other. I didn't show all the colors that went into the second set of baths as I have so many yards of those in the pure colors. They were sun yellow, golden yellow, fuchsia, turquoise and mixing blue.


This is another one where we stretched ourselves using browns over warm colors.

After the Jacket Class

Well, we spent another wonderful day at Marcia's studio working on our jackets. We had a smaller group this time and Priscilla was working on a jacket rather than spending all her time teaching us. We all made a lot of progress, I must say.



Donna is definitely making progress on her jacket here. Here are the fronts partially sewn together. It is really shaping up!


I couldn't resist taking this picture of Donna working on her jacket. She got a whole lot accomplished on this one day and I am sure will be done in no time.



She even managed to get quite a bit of the piecing finished on the back which exceeded ever her expectations.


This is the beginnings of Priscilla's jaguar jacket. I fell absolutely in love with the panel which Priscilla found on ebay. We all loved the colors that she is surrounding it with. It is such a nice shade of blue and she found so much to match it from her stash. We all very much encouraged her NOT to put those drop dead gorgeous beaded pieces on the jacket as then we could swoop down on them. She didn't fall for it and will probably include some of them on the front. They were stunning but then the whole jacket is stunning.


This is pretty much how the jacket back looked at the end of the day.



Here is the front of Marcia's jacket. She spent a lot of time moving one of the patches in the front so that it would show -- that is the tricky thing about clothing -- some places just don't show when you put the clothing on! The jacket is really shaping up and should be very elegant when finished -- especially with all that black pieced work.


Well, here is the final picture of the front of my jacket. I am relatively pleased with the changes that I made. I had already finished the back as well.


However, after getting home and now seeing this picture (taken from Priscilla Kibbee's blog - http://www.priscillakibbee.blogspot.com/), I realized that having the black at the bottom of the back would just not do!! It made the jacket look like it was short in the back sooooooo. I got home and first undid the lining (which I had sewn in after adding all the interfacing which I had managed to forget before) and then undid the stitching holding down the middle piece. Everything is flip and sew so it builds out from this center piece. I then put in a couple of strips. I am still not totally happy as the bottom strip only shows about 3/8 inch but at least it is a bright color so the jacket shows its length. I then reassembled everything and of course forgetting the shoulder pads yet again. I will slip them in through the armholes as I refuse to take out the basting a THIRD time!!!