Dyeing Retreat- Floss and Perle Cotton

Last week two dear friends and I headed off to Folly Beach for some fun with dyes.  Of course, there were lots of supplies needed. Here are a few I took a week earlier.

 Mary's car was loaded with many more necessities.

Judy is very organized. She brings these dyed cloths so we can see the colors of the dye. It is very helpful in choosing our dyes.

 Mary brought us white perle cotton and embroidery floss to dye.

 We thought a variegated thread would be nice to try. We have 2 colors on the thread so far.

 This is what it looked like after all the dye was added.

The next batch had these 3 colors applied.

We did several batches. This is what they looked like after washing.

More from Denny's Studio

Denny is fortunate to have the entire walk out basement area of her house for her studio. She has many wonderful storage ideas that I had shown in an earlier blog. I thought I would show more photos from her fabulous studio rooms.

 You can see the abundance of shelving - all full.

 Nice way to store things.

Love these hangars. Haven't seen them before.

 Extensive paint and mixed media supplies.

 Storage for the special hand made papers.

 A nice way to hang items for a current project.

Her wet studio is fully stocked.

 Isn't this a clever way to keep the buckets from sticking together?

 She even has a place to store those wet plastic bags.

 So organized. See all those turntables stacked up on the left?

 Bins of fabric.

 These two photos have more great ways to store/display special fabrics.

 These boards with extra large clips are very useful.

 She has plenty of pool noodles for rolling her quilts.

 A new acquisition is this huge roll of extra wide freezer paper. 

 This roll of fencing is made of plastic! It will be easier to work with than metal. Thanks for sharing, Denny.

 This massive bookcase was located in the bathroom. All very good space, don't need to waste it!

 Here Denny is showing me her innovative storage of completed quilts. She has a very sturdy double row freestanding clothing rack on which there are many dozen clip-on style hangers.

 Is this not an excellent way to store them and yet keep them readily available? I hope to use this idea also.

A larger item is rolled and stored on top of the racks.

 Denny is the proud owner of a large box of the oversized pool noodles.

 Some items on her design wall.

 Bolts and rolls of all kinds of great, very useful materials.

 I thought I had a large thread collection, but Denny's is more extensive.

 I especially like the massive rolls and bolts of different battings.

 These very huge rolls are covered with cloth to keep them clean as they hang from the ceiling.

More Paper Cloth with Melanie

Melanie was home for Easter and she wanted to make some paper cloth. She liked the Easter cards I had sent out this year from it.

 So we emptied my big bag of stuff and got to it. Oh, it looks like it may have been happy hour.

 This is my 1st one before I added the tissue paper. I was looking for a fall theme, thinking ahead to Thanksgiving cards.

 My 2nd one is a Christmas theme.

 Melanie made this one. It is made with fun spring colors.

 So, she started cutting the paper and added a little rick rack from my bag of bits and pieces.

She made 16 cards from that sheet of paper cloth. They really look nice.

White Meadow

Last fall the Fiber Junkies worked with fiber paste and stencils. It was a really fun method and produced some lovely pieces. Judy used a bamboo stencil and created this lovely cloth.

I love it and so did she.  She made a fabulous piece from this cloth and it is pictured on her blog "Windy Hill Happenings"

This is a cloth I had made from a deconstructed screen printing session.

I had stenciled in the row of flowers in white and green fiber paste.

I wanted to do a little thread sketching. I started by stitching in the flowers from the fiber paste. Then I added some leaves and flowers in different green threads.

The upper part of the piece needed a little adjustment to the color, which was achieved with colored pencils. Next was to quilt in more floral motifs for texture in the background.  After experimenting with several shades of green and lavender thread, I chose a white thread so that it would not overpower the subtle coloration of the piece.

 I decided a border was needed and chose a hand dye that was the right color. After quilting it and looking at it again, I was not happy with the border. While the proportions were good, I thought the color of the border was dominating the piece.

So I decided to narrow the border, cut off half of it. That was easier said than done since it was already quilted. This is it pinned back.

This is the finished piece. I have named it "White Meadow". It measures 15" x 11".