Pages

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Dyeing with STITCH on Anderson Island


My art quilt group, STITCH, hopped on the ferry yesterday for a trip to Anderson Island to dye fabric at Andrea's house. It was a gorgeous, sunny, hot day.


We tore fabric into quarter yards, lugged 12 buckets of hot water onto the deck ...


... measured dye and diluted it more for each step in the gradation ...


... and stirred, stirred, stirred.



In between stirring sessions, we soaked in the bright colors of a perfectly cloudless Northwest day. Temps were in the 80s, which is hotter than usual, but it sure beats the grey days of winter.



When it was time for show and tell, Andrea showed an amazing totally thread-painted owl. The back side (second photo) looks like a snow scene.




Carol showed her first experiment with making her own cordage by zigzagging with a cording foot over several strands of yarn. She followed directions in Susan Lenz's blog: http://artbysusanlenz.blogspot.com/2015/05/making-cord-and-tags-for-keys-plus.html. Susan makes fabulous bowls from her cords.


After a delicious potluck lunch and more stirring, we put our wet fabric in baggies to take home on the ferry. We had this view of snowy Mt. Rainier.


 

The photo above is the Chambers Bay golf course, site of next week's U.S. Open. I think the browns of the course and blues of the water look like the two gradated color runs we dyed. We used bronze and cerulean blue.


I've linked up to Nina Marie's Off-the-Wall Fridays if you want to see what other fiber artists have been doing this week:  http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/

 Have a colorful day

3 comments:

  1. Looks like you all had a fun day! Guess you wanted definite solid colors, what with all that stirring! My friend Wendy and I have done gradation dyeing classes where we pour the dyes into ziplock bags, then add the pre-soda soaked fabric, squshed around to saturate the fabric, then put the bags in the sun. Got some great patterns in gradations that way. Thanks for the link to the blog on cordage... I must check that out! And I'm glad you folks are finally enjoying some sunny and warm weather up there!

    ReplyDelete
  2. perfectly matching real life! LeeAnna jealous of your group...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lovely fabric! And such a gorgeous place to do your dyeing!

    ReplyDelete