Mystery

My quilt guild is doing a mystery challenge.  The pattern is by Debbie Maddy and she desinged it just for us.
Here are my fabric choices:

Most of these are from a collection called "Zen" that I bought at least 2 1/2 years ago.

I decided to take out the one on the left and added one that was even darker for more contrast.

This will be the border.  It and the green are the only two I had to buy.  The rest is from my stash--even the backing.
I'm excited to see what it will turn into.  It's a mystery.

Snow Dyeing

I think we got about 8 inches of snow on Friday. I mentioned in the last post that I had tried to do some "snow dyeing". Here's Part II:
After we (meaning Tim) brought the tub of fabrics in out of the snow I left them out in the garage overnight and this is what it looked like the next morning. I've done some fabric dyeing before so I knew that the exciting part (and the most time consuming part) was ahead of me: the rinsing. It's so exciting to see what you've got. But it takes ALOT of time to rinse and rinse and rinse....(now you know why hand dyed fabric is so expensive)

I love the results! And for some reason it seemed like I didn't have to rinse as much. Maybe it was because all the pieces were in the same family of colors and after I got the water running semi-clear I threw them all in the washer together to rinse some more. Normally, I separate them by colors to go in the washer.

There are 8 pieces in all. But for some reason I couldn't get them to all download on this post.

I've used all the dye that I got with the class Leslie and I took in Sept. at Quilters' Pow Wow. The question now will be whether I (we) decide to get into dyeing enough to start buying and mixing our own dyes. Stay tuned....

I'm Dyeing!

While Leslie and I were at Quilter's Pow Wow at Western Hills Resort near Wagner, Oklahoma a couple of weeks ago we took a class in fabric dying called "Low Imersion Dyeing". It was SO much fun. We did the dyeing in quart jars. The teacher(Sherry Worley of Princeton, TX) had the dye all mixed for us so we just basically played all day. She was kind enough to allow us to come back after the class had ended and play some more.

We dyed so much that we both ended up with somewhere around 20 fat quarters each. These three fat quarters came out of one jar. They were just added at different times.

This is Leslie with our two examples of true red. Leslie carefully measured her colors with an eye dropper and kept count of the number of drops (hers is on the right). I just dumped my colors together and came up the the color on the left.

Here are the large squares we did. We rolled them up like a jelly roll. I folded my fabric in quarters first. Leslie rolled hers up a little off center (on purpose). We were both very happy with the results.

At the end of the class we dumped a lot of colors together and this is what we got. Love it!!!

We're looking forward to using up the rest of our dye and creating some more fun.