October Cornucopia

 

As it's Halloween today, here's a vintage picture of our pumpkins from way back in 2014. I hope your day is as spooky and candy-filled as you wish. This is a cornucopia post that contains links to all the stuff I enjoyed online this past month, hopefully you'll find something in here that will be a treat.

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A well-illustrated tutorial on making fancy 3 fabric pillowcases.

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Great article about how sewing skills can help you to Never Acquire Clothes the Same Way Again by Ann Friedman.

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I saw this sweater repair video on Instagram and thought it was lovely and a brilliant solution. Will I ever do it? Probably not, but now I know it's an option.

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A brief history of candy corn, in my opinion: yuck! But you can certainly have mine if you like it.

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Don't forget, November 4th is International Scrap Sorting Day.

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I always enjoy reading A.R. Moxon's writings, this recent one about "Appropriate Anger" really gets to the point.

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Some advice for spooky Halloween costuming from the 19th century!

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I watched a lot of spooky horror this month, really enjoyed the mini-series The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix. It combines so much of Edgar Allan Poe's work all in one delicious gothic story. Not for the faint of heart though. I also started listening to a BBC podcast, The Lovecraft Investigations. It's really a radio play complete with sound effects and music and excellent voice acting. If you've ever read any H.P. Lovecraft, you'll enjoy this one.

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Grey+Color

 I took the weekend off for family stuff mostly, but I did finally get to washout my dyeing efforts from Friday on Sunday. So these babies were in the dye pots and bags for a while. This is the results of the toning with grey exercise from the Dye Mastery class that I'm taking.  

Just by using a small amount of grey, the same 12 step color wheel definitely looks a lot different. That's yellow up in the top left corner, now a nice olive.

I'm pretty pleased with the results and now I get to try doing the second part of that lesson.

Here are my most recent efforts to produce some more useable dyed fabric for the Temperature Quilt. I've hit it right on with some of them, others are way way off. So that will be another part of what I'm dyeing tomorrow.

I started putting up the next month's worth of pieces for the May column of the Temperature Quilt and got stopped halfway through because I'd run out of the fabric that represents some of the more common temperatures. 

Now I can get back to cutting and carry on assembling the columns. They go together pretty fast once I get them laid out.

Using hand-dyed fabrics for this quilt was going to be a risk in just this way, I predicted it. But, I'm really enjoying doing the work to try and get close enough. Thankfully with the variation in the dyed fabrics I've already used, it'll work out pretty soon.

Afternoon Dye-In

 

The sun came out strong as I finished up my dyeing efforts today. Did the first half of the next Dye Mastery class and some more Temperature Quilt dyeing. I have to wait until tomorrow to see how it turns out.

Pantone Choosing

 

Time for more Pantone Project blocks to get made and that means auditioning fabrics. 

I was surprised at how many options I had for matching rust.

I really wanted to use one of these prints, but they just weren't the correct intensity of yellow.

I love this blue.

Now I'm all ready to go to make five more blocks.

Mostly Analogous

 

Here's the promised group shot of all the over-dyed strips. I've arranged them in the same order as the FQ group shot..

Turns out the Yellow group is the only one I did "correctly" or as per the class instructions. All of the over-dyed colors were supposed to follow this scheme: analogous to the right on the color wheel of yellow, analogous to the left on the color wheel of yellow and finally the complement of yellow. So two adjacent analogous colors and one opposite on the color wheel complement. My favorite of this group is the complement with the over-dye of violet. Left to right: Yellow, yellow-orange, green, violet. 

For some reason, I did the complement correctly for the next color, Yellow-Orange, but then instead of doing two analogous colors to Yellow-Orange, I did two more complements Blue-Violet and Violet, but analogous to the complement (Blue), not the original color. The correct colors to over-dye would have been Yellow and Red. So...my over-dye work except for the Yellow group is very very different than the rest of the classes' work. But luckily, I really like them quite a lot. The patterning especially is super interesting to me, some of these almost look like plaid tartans.

From left to right: Orange, Orange and Violet, Orange and Blue-Green, Orange and Blue. The blue one is So Dark and mysterious, in person there are so many colors creating so much depth.

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Red-Orange, Red-Orange and Blue-Green, Red-Orange and Green, Red-Orange and Blue.

Red, Yellow, Blue-Green, Green

Red-Violet, Yellow, Yellow-Orange, Green. 

Violet, Blue-Green, Orange, Yellow

Blue-Violet, Orange, Yellow, Yellow-Orange

Blue, Red, Yellow-Orange, Orange

Green, Violet, Orange, Red

Blue-Green, Red-Violet, Orange, Red

Yellow-green,violet, red, red-violet.

Only Nineteen

🎵🎶 Happy Birthday, dear blog 🎵🎶 Happy Birthday to you!🎵🎶

Last year I wrote a long post about this blog's 18th anniversary. I kind of covered it all there looking backwards over all these years keeping up this blog. As you know, I've definitely had varied results each year, sometimes a lot more regularly than others. This year I wanted to look forwards instead to the year 2042. (How sci fi does that sound?) I will be almost 78 then, will I still be making stuff and blogging about it? I hope so!

Will blogger still exist 19 years from now? It seems so improbable that it's remained for these 19 years, doesn't it? With the way various tech platforms come and go in and out of our lives (do you remember live journal?) it doesn't seem possible that blogger will still be around in nineteen *more* years. Maybe it will still exist but be in a different form. I could see it being integrated within other apps we all regularly use. Will there still be the digital divide between Apple products and everything else? Or will there be some industry standard imposed by actual US government regulation? Don't laugh, it could happen--maybe.

Here's to hoping that there is still some way for non-journalists to write like this publicly in nineteen years. And even more generally, here's to hoping we all make it to the year 2042 with the ability to connect, converse, and share beauty and creativity. Thanks for coming along on the ride with me, I appreciate it more than I can express here.

Washout Day

Saturday afternoon was 24 hours since I'd finished dyeing, but I didn't have the energy, so I left it all to Sunday. After a whole lot of rinsing and washing, I've gotten it all done.  

Now this is a fun to-be-ironed pile! The dyeing washout day was done in stages, blue/purple/greens was the first load. The big pieces in the foreground are the half yards for the Temperature Quilt.

The first strip that I opened up to iron made me go, wow! 

As I ironed I pinned them up with the original color strip that didn't get over-dyed.

And a whole lot more, it's getting so complex.

Another load to be ironed, this time the reds and oranges. I didn't take a photo of the yellows to be ironed. It's so funny that the strips that I steam ironed the accordion folds into went back to that way after I unfolded them after washing and drying.  So they got ironed flat once again.

Here they all are in a rather chaotic picture, not really presented or arranged, each of the three over-dyed strips pinned up with the control color strip. It's just a wall of color and dark and light and texture. Such a variety, I'm super pleased. And very tired! I had really forgotten just how tiring dyeing is physically. It's such a joy while you're doing it that it's quite easy to push through and end up over-tired. But that might just be me.

I will take another finale photo after I do a whole lot of arranging, as well as take some more detailed closeups.  

Fabric Postcards Everywhere

On Saturday, I received this really lovely fabric postcard all the way from Australia from Lynette Linden. 

This is the one that I sent to her. What a fun exchange this was, thanks to SAQA for organizing it.

But then on that very same Saturday, DH and I walked into our branch library community room and found this very cool display of fabric postcards. What a coinky-dink, huh?

I know, I should have moved the fan, but I thought it was funny.

I really enjoyed how these were presented in a curated, sorted sort of way. Like the hearts/Valentines one on the far right for example.

A close-up of a particularly fiber-y one.

Here's the exhibit placard, all these fabric postcards are the work of Barbara Lockwood, a Boulder Creek quilter who organized the CZU Lightning Fire Quilt distribution in 2021.

Dyed Strips

 Each of the original 12 fat quarters has been torn into four strips and then those have been grouped into 10 different dye colors that'll be used in the over-dyeing process.

Here are strips from the original 12 fat quarters as seen in the group shot yesterday. These are working as the "control group" for this over-dyeing process. They've got their little paper tags with the safety pins because they're no longer going to be getting in a dye bath.

Some of the groups have more strips than the other groups, but that's how this works out with the dye colors we're working with.

I had to accordion fold and then steam iron the folds for each strip. I'm hoping this will create a sort of cross-hatch grid work look.

Here you can see one group's strips, with their machine-embroidered codes on the selvedge. Other methods of marking are also used like various waterproof markers, sewing on small squares of Tyvek with the information written on them, etc. But with 36 strips now, you've got to keep track to see which color interacts in which way with the other dyes.

Now they're all rolled up and ready to dye. It's a little fiddly, but keeping track of which color got over-dyed in what other color is going to be very interesting. I can't wait to compare them all!

Dyed Group Shot

One last group shot before all these FQ's get torn up into 4ths for over-dyeing experiments for the second part of the Dye Mastery class I'm taking. The whole point is that this is supposed to be a repeatable skill, dyeing fabric to look approximately the same. There are a lot of variables of course, but now that I have the formulas and the process down, it'll be fine. Just like convincing myself to use precious fabric, I can always make more.

For the Temperature Quilt, I've gotten three fabrics dyed out of the ten that I needed so far.  They're not exactly right, but I think given the variation within the dyed fabrics I've already been using they will work out fine.

I'm going to be using three different fabrics, Pimatex PFD, Kona, Painter's Palette which I've embroidered on the selvedge of the half yard pieces. I'll be trying to get close to these purple, blues and greens. Taking this dyeing class has really helped remind me about how the various dye colors work together which will hopefully be useful here.