Giveaway Results

And the winners are.....

Jen of A Quilting Jewel

and Marlene of Sipiweske Quilt Designs

Congratulations ladies!!!

My thanks to everyone that participated. There we almost 200 entries. I had a chance to meet many new people and found some wonderful blogs that I had not seen before.

Soon I will be starting on my Mandala quilt for the Art Quilts Around the World challenge. I have some hand dyed velvet set aside for this project. Recently Lynn from that group asked how well these velvets would felt. I had no experience using this silk backed rayon velvet for felting so suggested a using a stablizer. Along with her purchase I sent 3 other types of velvet including cotton and polyester. She dropped me an email to let me know the results:

"Just a note to let you know I finished my mandala using your velvet fabrics. They were easy to felt and top sew free motion style. I did not back them with anything. I used the sample pieces and the ones I ordered and all seemed to be equally easy. No problems whatsoever. Thanks again for supplying me with wonderful fabrics to work with. "

Thanks for trying these fabrics out for me Lynn. I can't wait to see her finished quit.

A Day to Celebrate!

Welcome to the world baby boy! My sister and her husband welcomed there son Jack into the world today. We are overjoyed for them. They will be such wonderful parents.

Thank you to all of my friends who have been keeping my sister and son in your thoughts. He is healthy and adorable and just the cutest baby ever.

I may be a bit late announcing the winners of the giveaway. I'm heading to Iowa tomorrow to clean house and wash baby clothes so all is ready when Jack comes home from the hospital. You see Jack just couldn't wait to make his appearance. He was two weeks early. We think he couldn't have come at a better time.

Wishing you all well! Chris

P.S. There is still time to enter the giveaway. Please leave a comment on my previous blog post if you want to enter.

Dye Candy Giveaway

Welcome to my Dye Candy Giveaway. If you are new to my blog, I welcome you and invite you to look around. You have at least two chances to win a prize. Leave a comment here and enter a second time on my other blog Shadygrovestudios.blogspot.com. You are welcome to copy the top picture of my dye candy sample packs and use it if you are creating a link to this giveaway on your own blog. If you create a link please leave me a note in your comment and I will enter your name in the drawing two more times.

If you are a winner you will have your choice of one of these prizes:

1 Gift Certificate for $25.00 for my Dye Candy Shop or

2 Dye Candy Sample Packs or

1 yard of Hand Dyed one of a kind fabrics or

a half yard of Shibori Dyed Fabric or

6 step fat quarter gradation set.

or a hand dyed silk or velvet scarf.

Choose a piece of Quilt Block Jewelry or

a small Stained Glass Snowflake Sun Catcher Ornament from my Shady Grove Studios Shop

Good Luck to you! Drawing closes at 6:00 pm on Sunday, November 22nd.

Hand Painted Fabrics Before and After

Before Washing

After Washing

The fabric in the upper left corner was painted with purpose using transparent Set-A-Color paints. The rest of these fabrics were used to clean up the painting surface during a fabric painting class I taught in August. Some of my favorite fabrics have come from accidents and spills. If I don't like the results of the "accidents" you can always add more paint next time you work.

Once the Set-A-Color Paints are dried they are heat fixed to fabric using a hot iron. Set the iron to the temperature that matches the type of fabric you have painted. Iron slowly to heat the fabric thoroughly. You may use a pressing cloth if you are concerned about the paint getting on your ironing surface the first time you work with these paints. I use a an old towel under my fabrics but I'm not sure it is necessary. I've never seen any evidence of the paint transferring from the fabric to the ironing surface.

Washing the fabric is not necessary depending on your intended use. If you choose to wash...wash fabrics in your washing machine and hang to dry. Washing fabrics will remove a bit of the paint pigment from the surface. As you can see above there is little difference in the color before and after the wash.

The finished fabric will be stiffer than a dyed fabric. I like to use these fabrics in art quilts, ATC's and landscape quilts.

Check back tomorrow. I will be hosting a giveaway from my ETSY shops.

Organizing My Life, Once Again

Remember this photo from September? By the end of September I was working in 4 rooms of the house. Some days I spent more time searching for misplaced items than I did working on projects.

By October it was worse. I took a weekend to clean the carpets and then I got to work. I moved my studio to a room that has enough space to hold almost everything I use. The rest of my stash is stored in the hallway leading into this room. The best part is the door. I can close it and make the mess disappear anytime I like.

It is a work in progress and only a small portion of the room is put together. I now have an area for packaging outgoing orders. I have long wanted a spot that is dedicated to shipping.

Fabrics ready to ship, dyeing supplies and my personal stashes are stored in roll away bins that fit under the tables.

I have a 10'x7' wall space set aside for a design wall. You can see part of it to the left in this photo. I have some small finish nails along the top part of the wall. I attach binder clips to flannel fabric or flannel backed tablecloths. This allows me to make the design wall any size that works best for my current projects.

I recently purchased this coupon file to hold all of the paper tags I use for packaging my jewelry & fabrics. Now I can find them quickly. Trust me this is a big achievement. I hope to have more to show you soon. I know my sewing machine is in here somewhere...

I saw great organizing idea for fabric on Wanda's Exuberant Color blog. Click here to see how she organized her Kaffe Fassett fabric collections. I love this idea. Thanks for sharing it Wanda!

Update: I will be hosting another giveaway here and on my Shady Grove Studios blog starting this Sunday. Please stop back for a chance to win.

Candied Fabrics Giveaway

Candy of Candied Fabrics is hosting a wonderful giveaway. Follow this link to check out all the ways you can enter. Take some time to visit her store too. She has so many great products for sale.

A few weeks ago I purchased one of Candy's adorable "Fresh Picked" outfits. These outfits are so soft and cuddly. I wish I could show you a photo but it is a Christmas gift for my soon to be born nephew (so if you are my sister and you are reading this no peeking). Good luck to you!

Mokume Shibori Adventure #2

My friend Susan asked me to dye a t-shirt for her. I asked her what colors she liked to wear. She suggested yellow or pink so I started with a bubble gum pink and pale yellow.

Next I marked reference points around the neckline and started stitching. I gathered the fabric tightly when finished.

And over dyed the shirt in a fuchsia blue mixture to make a lovely purple.

(The colors appear a somewhat muted in last two pictures. I had to take these photos without natural lighting.)

Because the fabric was slightly ribbed the dye migrated deeper between the stitches. The yellow turned a beautiful blend of green, red, orange and brown.

Purple is one of my favorite dye combinations. I chose purple for the finished shirt to go with a brilliant green Mohave turquoise necklace that she often wears.

Mokume Shibori Adventure #1

This summer I dyed a rayon skirt medium brown. The fabric had a slightly textured appearance of soft buckskin. I added too much salt water to the dye stock and found the over all effect boring and plain looking.

I knew I wanted to go darker and add some interesting detail so I pulled out my favorite Shibori technique books and decided on a Mokume design.

I used a wash away marker to draw stitching guidelines along the bottom row of the skirt. Next I added the hand stitches, trying to keep each stitch even, occasionally changing stitch lengths to add breaks in the linear flow of the finished dye pattern. The stitching took about 12 hours over the next few weekends.

I gathered the threads tight to add a resist to the fabric. I over dyed the skirt using two dye colors of black dyes blended together. Dharma's Better Black (#44) has a purple undertone and New Black (#300) has a blue undertone.

The blue/black reacted with the fabric slowly. It flowed out and into some of the light colored areas adding a blue/green cast. The purple black reacted quickly. It did not migrate through the fabric as much leaving behind areas of vibrant black/browns.

I refer back to these books often when looking for color inspirations and design ideas. The book on the left "Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing" by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Jane J. Barton and Mary Kellogg Rice has an extensive pictorial reference library. I've spent hours combing through this book and have filled it with bookmarks of design ideas for future projects. The book on the right "Shibori Designs and Techniques" has great directions for many different Shibori techniques and love the vibrant color pictures in this book.

Velvet

I recently added hand dyed silk rayon blend velvet swatches to my Dye Candy Shop on Etsy.

Each measures approximately 20"x20"

I love the idea of velvet as an embellishment. It has the touch me quality that I find so irresistible in a quilt. Yes, I kept a little bit of each color for myself, wouldn't you?

Dreaming the Wheel

Last weekend I worked on a custom order. 7 value steps were requested using four tertiary colors and one secondary color from the RYB color wheel. Each pure color was the "medium color" with three steps to a lighter tint (using less dye) and 3 steps to a darker shade (adding black).

This was a very interesting exercise. The biggest surprise was the reaction of the black dye with the various fabrics. To balance the undertones in the black dyes I used a mixture of two black dyes. Dharma's Better Black (#44) has a purple undertone and New Black (#300) has a blue undertone.

I used the same amount of dye for each of the steps. The orange and yellow dyes were overwhelmed by the black dye while the greens, Aquamarine and Violet interacted well and show through in most of the steps.

I love working on projects like this. For those of you that dye, you know that dyeing is not always an exact science. Experience adds to accuracy using dyes. I second guessed my instincts and added too much blue dye to one of my dye stock solutions which resulted in a grass green instead of a yellow green. I also missed the Aquamarine color by just small amount yellow. I ended up with beautiful turquoise and teal blues instead. I am a bit of a perfectionist so I re-dyed the teal lot the next day. I have noticed that these problems always happen close to my bedtime and for that reason I try to finish most dye lots before dinner. Last night I added some of these dye lots to my Dye Candy Shop.