A year or more ago my dear Mother-in-law gave me three jars of dyes. A Yellow, Fuchsia and Turquoise… basically the three primary colors. I pondered and pandered about how to use them, as there no instructions or even a brand name… what fabric would they work on? Anyhow today I decided to stop screwing around and just experiment.
I did not have any extra pots or pans to donate to become a dye pot so I decided to use a freezer Ziploc bags, a ceramic bowl and then microwave the contents instead of boiling them.
I think I have acid dyes, check out Dharma Trading company to order your own. So after seeing that acid dyes are for fabrics that come from a creature such as wool from a sheep or silk from a worm. I promptly went to my stash and cut the arm off an old wool suit, cut some pieces of tweed, cut chunks off my silk/rayon, a scrap of pure wool felt and store bought wool/rayon felt.
I say dying was a smashing success. The fabrics that contained rayon are the lighter ones in the photo, rayon is made of plant and acid dyes do not work on plant based fibers. Yet the wool part did take the dye, the silk velvet is so pretty. I can’t wait to make something from it.
The moral of this story is, I should have been playing with dyes long ago. The microwave worked great, I only nuked each bag about 5 min until the water was clear. I am now eyeing all my fabric wondering if I should throw it into the vat.
Now, what am I doing with wool and felt and silky soft velvet?
I'm making my holiday gift stash… these will become ornaments. I plan to make at least 20 and I’ve just started fleshing out patterns. I do love birdies, this will be fun.
Now imagine these cute little birds made from the colorful wool felt and tweed pictured above. So cute…
I’m off to create!
I love all the prints that went into this cute little table runner. I made a bunch of cute apron a years or so ago and the scraps from that project ended up cut into triangles. I have some grand plans for all those scraps, but I left then in a drawer until I don’t quite know what my plan really was….. So after a few layouts, I decided to just commit and make something cute, colorful, small and playful.
The results are so fresh and happy, I love it. It will make a fine little gift for someone special.
Project of the day, Paper piecing. I’ve never done it, but it looks doable. I made a pattern on a super cool freeware program called Quilt Assistant . You open a picture and you make your own paper piecing pattern. The website has a PDF tutorial that covers all the basics. I thought the pattern making was a cinch. What I have not found out is if I can actually make it.
My first project will be the farm house and red roofed barn. I think I made it 12”x9” or so.
We have some fun plans for this Labor day weekend, how about yourselves? Anyone going on a fun end of summer adventure?
We are going to head out to San Francisco in the morning with a couple of good friends, I get to drag my awesome husband and friends to Peapod Fabrics. Peapod has some fabulous, cuter than possible fabrics, and I will of course be buying something for a future project.
We are then heading to Cha Cha Cha for a divine Spanish Tapa’s style lunch. Seriously, this little restaurant rocks, I can’t wait. If you find yourself in the Haight & Ashbury area, GO THERE!
Then the real party begins, we are going to booze it up, go see some Giants and meet up with a bunch more friend's, party a little bit more…. at the end of the day we shall stumble to our hotel and pass out from exhaustion.
Have a good weekend my friends!
Cytel
The office / music / guest room is all finished except for the curtains.
Check out the change … Top is the “after” photos, we painted the walls, built an office desk into the closet. Stained the concrete floors and framed out areas to hang the guitars. If you check out the lower photo of the office you can see what a wreck it was…the floor was blahhhh concrete with old paint and dried on glue. Nothing was organized. we have to much outdated oversized UGLY furniture… my fault I’ll drag home almost any free furniture.
Anyhow now we just love it and it is so great to see a nice clean,cool ,modern room that was transformed from chaos in just a few short weeks.
Before… what a mess eh?
Because I’m not one to sit back on my laurels and do nothing I have thrown myself into the Sacramento Modern Quilt Guild’s Free Spirit Habitat Challenge.
I was given fat eighths of these 6 fabrics above. These are from Jay McCarroll’s fabric line called “Habitat” made by Free Spirit. Remember Jay was a winner on Project Runway a while back. Our challenge is to use these as the focus of our quilt and we can use solids for any other fabrics we may need to complete the look.
I love challenges especially when I am pushed outside my usual comfort zone. For me I would not have sought these fabrics out at the store, but after I came up with various ideas I came to really like them.
Here are a few of the concepts I thought about…
The picture on the right was the winner. I am now hard at work stitching the stars to the background, and I need to make one more large star to complete the layout.
I talked of my quilt and my plans for the music room, and by the the time I published the post I was ready to stain the floors and paint the room.
So now it is empty and I am on hands and knees with wire brushes, razor scrapers, scrub brushes and Goof-Off prepping the concrete for staining.
Fingers crossed for smooth sailing….
I’ll post the results next week.
It is now finished, quilted and washed. I made it for a twin bed we have in our office/ music room. It really goes perfect for what I have planned in here.
We removed the carpets from the floor… if you ever read my blog a year or so ago you would know the story of all my flooring… needless to say it is all slowly going away and being changed out.
So anyhow, as of now the floor is just plain concrete slab, The walls are boring white…
My plan is to use the dark earthy colors from this quilt ( and they are earthy, my photo is capturing a lot of light) mainly a deep purple color to stain my concrete floor. I will do it like I did in the Master bath, a simple design with a translucent brown over coat. We bought a few more guitar hangers so now we have 5 guitars on the walls, more on the floor stands… keyboards, amps all sorts of stuff. I want to make the room masculine, and for it to have a musical/ creative vibe. I’d like to paint 3 walls in one color and the fourth wall a dark color, make some heavy curtains with a sheer golden curtain behind so gusts and musicians can block out the light and just shut themselves in. My concern with wall colors is this is a small room, and dark will probably make it appear smaller… perhaps the dark color will be the one wall and a lighter color on the other three… I don’t know.
This quilt picks up the colors of a couple of the guitars, like the midnight blue. the golden yellow… my whole color scheme is based n this quilt. I need help choosing wall colors, I always pick odd colors that are just to much to handle…. anyone want to help ?
I think I will make a nice floor carpet to go with this quilt and the overall room theme, I am really leaning toward deep maroons and purples and gold's… just think about it makes me want to go fabric shopping.
I just got home a few days ago from Cabo San Lucas Mexico and I am inspired. While Cabo was a blast, with fantastic food friendly people and an ocean to die for. What really got my inner muse inspired was a small town to the north called Todos Santos.
Todos Santos is a smaller quit town with an artistic vibe. There where art galleries and vendors not unlike Cabo but the art was so superior, the ceramics of fishes, geckos, dishes of every sort, the skeletal Catrina’s with their flowers and veils, glittered day of the dead art, inlaid urns … lordy I wish I had taken more photo’s. below is just a snippet of the beauty you can see there and around Mexico.
After immersing myself into this place for the last two weeks my muse has found me yet again. Today I sat in my Hot 100 degree garage and cut and embossed tin cans… made paper clay, painted and made a huge art mess in my kitchen.
Up on the left you can see a little of the paper mache Catrina’s I am working on… Oh I am super excited, now I have an excuse to use lots of glitter and sequins!! Oh how I love sparkles.
On the right you can see the tin art for my patio wall I am making. I plan to also make some birds and a mermaid…
Below is the near finished pieces, all they need now is a wire to hang from.
