Cherries! one last entry to avoid if you want to be surprised …
Well, the block isn’t very special, but the reason for making it is. On swap-bot, some of us are making blocks for a quilt to donate in memory of Cheryl LaVon, a member who died a year ago. The theme is “nature”, and she liked deep rich colours, so I hope she would have liked this Churn Dash block:
Another bobbin lace bookmark using Christine Springett’s snake design, made for a friend. The colours are brighter than the photo shows. I send these bookmarks in sleeves even though I usually use my own ones without them. The snakes do tend to twist if they are used without a sleeve, which is a bit of a nuisance, so I leave it for the recipients to chooose.
The dyeing from Sunday’s Procion MX workshop did not dry till Tuesday, and it has taken me until today to remember about it in daylight and get a photo. In the morning, we had done the dyeing for the samples, and our teacher Debbie had demonstrated some techniques for multi-colour dyeing. In the afternoon, we got the chance to try whichever we wanted, and this is what I did:
On the left is a hank of dip-dyed superwash merino/nylon sock yarn. It was just an afterthought when I found I had a little time left at the end of the afternoon. It didn’t work out quite as planned, as the pink was stronger than I had intended and the yarn ‘grabbed’ the dye very quickly so there wasn’t enough left to give the gentle transition between the colours. I might overdye the almost-white sections with more pink but I’ll probably just leave them as they are.
The middle item is a sock blank, as explained here. Again, the colours didn’t work out quite as I planned, but I am happy with it. It will probably become socks for me.
The two pieces of printed cotton were just an experiment to see how the colours worked over existing patterning. The standard 1% dye solution was not strong enough so I had use too much. It still didn’t give the depth of colour I wanted and the colours on the larger piece merged together too much. I need some more experimentation with that.
I have been distracted this week, but I do have another project started. I probably will not have a picture of that until at least Sunday, even though it is only a small project.
Just to prove I did make something today (Sunday, though technically it is Monday here now), here are some dye pots cooling on the porch during the dyeing workshop today – two of them were mine:
These hanks were just for cutting up for colour sample cards later in the day. We did more interesting dyeing in the afternoon (painting and dip-dyeing), but my samples are still wet, so I will not get photos of those until tomorrow or Tuesday.
Today I went to my first guild meeting since last summer, so I didn’t have time to make much, just these swap cards using fabric scraps left over from recent sewing swaps:
The talk today was on the history of dyeing. Tomorrow, the speaker will be teaching a workshop using Procion MX dyes, so my samples from that should be my Thing-a-Day.
Here are the last 2 blocks, for 2 different partners this time. BTW, all the blocks really are square – the problem is my photography, not my cutting skills. Anyway, the photo is after the break again …
Yesterday’s blocks …
I am in two swaps for string quilt blocks, one for blocks with the strips parallel to two sides and the other for random diagonal strips. Both require us to send one block each to four partners, and three of my partners are the same for both swaps. The swaps are receiver’s choice of colours, but two of my partners chose similar colour schemes, so I worked on their blocks together yesterday. It was too late to take a photo of their four blocks when I finished, so I took it today. To avoid spoiling the surprise if they happen to read this post, it is after the break, so …
SPOILER ALERT!
I’ve made the smaller mini-journal which I mentioned yesterday. It’s 1″ by 1″ (the minimum size for the swap), with 5 2-sheet signatures.