Metro Twist Top

 I turned my attention to the finishing off the assembly of the Metro Twist top.

There was one column left to put together the pieces into blocks.

I put on a good BBC story podcast and got down to it. Here's all four columns completed.

And then tah-dah...the Metro Twist top is complete. Well, except for the consideration of additional borders of course.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out, the curves are gentle yes, but they're still curves. And using the Quick Curve Ruler is a very accurate method to get them done well.

So, yay another quilt top, that needs a back, quilting and binding. Adding it to the list.

PIQF Fabrics & More

 During the class I took at PIQF I realized that my fabric selections weren't serving me very well. I brought a lot of very high contrast typography fabrics, some other random mostly brights and some of my hand-dyes.

So I dashed downstairs during lunch and bought some FQ's to work with. They are all browns and some are quite ugly, yes, but I used all of them.

And I also bought some small sharp scissors, as the Kai ones I brought were not sharp enough and not small enough for the tiny pieces of fabric we were working with. These Sookie Sews micro tip scissors ended up being perfect and they were on big sale too. Bonus is that the handles actually fit my fingers which was a surprise. Usually small scissors do not fit me well. I notice that the package says "Large Ring Scissors", I guess that's what I need.

And then on Monday morning, I got to pick up the mail and my order from I💗TulaPink was here. They had a sale on quilt backs so I bought this HissyFit one, it's an enormous (54"x72") blown up digital print of one of my recent favorite Tula fabric prints. 

My plan is to use it as the back of my City Sampler.

I also had to. get the unicorn pins that were on sale, because pink unicorns. They're really nice pins besides the novelty aspect.

Yesterday I picked up my two PIQF quilts and "had" to got to Golden State Quilting. I was much "better" this time and "only" bought 2 yards of white Painter's Palette to use in more dyeing for the Temperature Quilt. I now see one of the reasons why they volunteer to organize collecting quilts, haha. No picture, because it's just white fabric. And yes, I'm going to machine embroider the selvedge before dyeing.

Class With Uzoma Samuel

This was my view in the front row of Fabric Portrait class with Uzoma Samuel, who came all the way from Lagos, Nigeria to teach at PIQF.  The wonderful friend-Jaye-made bag and a bag of fabric "in great variety" as per his supply list. I thought it was interesting that we didn't need to bring a photo of someone we wanted to do, or a background piece of fabric, or anything to draw on fabric with.

And then we were all handed a piece of artist canvas with the same portrait sketched onto it by our teacher. Each one was done individually, so they were all slightly different. 

Here's Uzoma zooming in on the eye and talking about how if you don't get the eyes right, your portrait won't really represent the individual person you're trying to portray. He had a lot of great advice about how to go about this. I liked that he had this projector with the actual photo, it was so great to have it to refer to the whole time. And then being able to zoom in on the different features was very useful.

Here's how my eyes started out. We didn't measure or trace at all, we used what he called "eye-gauge", you look at the photo you're working from and cut the shape you're working on. Just like when you draw.

It really was time consuming, finding the right shades to represent the 3-d-ness of the forehead.

Here's where I ended up. My left side of the nose got a little lost, so  I may go back and switch out some of the fabrics.

We all put our work up on the wall and it was fascinating to see how different they all were.

Some of the students had a selection of fabrics that were pretty challenging to work with in this context, but everyone gave it a real try. The other students were all really helpful and fun to be in class with, I found it very enjoyable.

I'm so glad I got to take this class, Uzoma Samuel had recently taught some classes in the Bay Area through the SJSA as detailed in the Bay Area issue of Quiltfolk, but I wasn't free. I'm so happy that he came back to the area to teach at PIQF.

Using this detailed approach to making a portrait is so different than other types of faces I've made in fabric. It's trying for more realism than I usually attempt or want to do. Maybe I'll re-do the small piece I did twenty-three years ago of my grandma in this method.

Very Brief PIQF

I only took a few pictures of a small part of the exhibits at PIQF during a break from the all-day class that I took on Saturday. Unfortunately I didn't get back to see the whole show, so please enjoy these. 

Above is a beautiful Therese May quilt called "Fractured Cat". I really love seeing how her style has changed and evolved over the years but is still recognizably hers. The matchstick quilting was really a great addition to this quilt.

"Modern Meet Manx" by Laura McHugh is a great quilt utilizing pieced blocks in a configuration I've never seen but is super effective visually. 

Hey, here's my quilt, "Lone Round Robin", a little bit rumpled from the journey.

I nearly squealed aloud when I saw this quilt hanging nearby mine, I just love these circles! Christi Sutphen's "The News is Causing Me to See Spots!'. Couldn't agree more with the sentiment.

Here's a bit of closeup of the corner. Great use of word fabrics.

I love these pieced shapes together with the embroidered vines/flowers. Mostly I was attracted to the soft yet vibrant hand dyed rainbow fabrics. The quilting is pretty terrific too. 

This quilt is called "Spinning Spools" made by Frankie Hey and quilted by Beth Handy. Here's a detail of the border so you can see the great appliqué and quilting.

This one is so great, the design is interesting,  balanced and lovely, but those colors are so beautiful and vibrant. 

This detail of "Finding Harmony" by Andrea Barrett shows off the well-thought out quilting design and the clever pieced-in circles.

More on the class that I took tomorrow.

Dye Drained

 
Here's one of the fat quarter bundles in the dye sink before being un-rubberbanded. I liked the pattern of the magenta swirls of dye.

Here's how that fabric looked after the washout, along with some of the beautiful dyed threads, quite the color combo, huh?

This is the first three of the fat quarters that I washed out for the Dye Mastery class. Yellow, Yellow-Orange and Orange.

I really pleased with the patterning I achieved with the folding and rolling.

Here are three of the half-yards that I dyed to use for the Temperature Quilt.

They turned out pretty darned close to what I need, so I will probably either use them, or over-dye them.

I'm happy to find that I have a Very Bright design wall all of a sudden, yay! Dyeing is tiring, I'm pooped, but glad to have all the colors around me.

More Metro

Starting out on Metro Twist sewing, here’s how it looked.

Two columns done.

Using the wood clapper to get those seams flattened.

It worked!

 Still snapping a picture of each block before I see it together.

Three columns down, started in on the final one.

Dying to Be Dyeing

 
Usually I don't take process pictures because I'm wearing rubber gloves and trying to keep on track with what I'm doing. So here are some before and after photos. This is the before setup, my pre-rolled and folded marked fabric fat quarters and the dyes I''ll be using for the class. Not all of these well get used today as I'm only doing the beginning 12 colors for the color wheel. I've never used ProChem dyes before (always used Dharma Trading), but they were recommended by the class syllabus.

While I've got all the dye stuff out, I decided to try and do some of the dyeing for my Temperature quilt colors that I need. I'm using the American Made PFD fabric that I bought last year, torn into half yards.

Here's an after photo of the 12 fat quarters in their own baggies.

And here are the half yard fabrics I'm dyeing to try and match close enough to the Temperature quilt colors. Plus one purple shirt I'm over-dyeing in purple in the bottom left.

I was pretty good at not getting dye all over myself, the new gloves I remembered to use helped a lot with that. Amazing when there's no holes how well they work. But one spot appeared on my forehead. DS noticed it first and said "I guess you're not done dyeing yet." DH and DS were cracking up when I was discussing my plans for dyeing today. Of course to the ear it sounds like I'm sharing the plans I'm making for dying, and that is just always quite funny no matter how many times the joke has been made. That one letter really means a lot, and context doesn't always help.

Now to wait the 24 hours batching time to see how it all turns out.

From White to Wow

 I'm so excited, I'm finally getting a chance to take a dyeing class with Jane Dunnewold. It's an eight week course called Dye Mastery: From White to Wow and it's all presented online so I don't have to travel to Texas for her in-studio teaching. I've been following her work and reading her books to learn how to dye, for many years so it's fabulous to get this chance to hear it right from the source. It's also fun seeing how everyone else is learning too. It's a great reset for me, to regain my confidence in the dye studio.

The first step we're starting with is dyeing a 12 step color wheel, so that means starting with 12 fat quarters. She left it up to us to choose the fabric, I picked a really smooth tight Pimatex cotton.

I machine embroidered the letter for each color on the selvedge of each FQ.

Then I accordion folded and steam ironed each fat quarter, 

I wrrapped each of them up with a rubber band making sure to leave the color initial showing. 

Here they are all bundle up and in order, all ready for dyeing tomorrow. I can't wait. Let me know if you need any rubber bands, I've got a few to spare as you can see.