Indigo and Batik Samples

December at college was dyeing with procion, indigo and batik samples. I'd bought Janice Gunner's book, Shibori for Textile Artists at the Knitting and Stitching Show so I had a go at some of her stitched resist techniques.


These two samples were made by

a) pinching and twisting little cones of fabric and fastening them with thread.

b) hand stitching rows of running stitch then gathering before dyeing.


I'm really pleased with how they turned out and will be quilting them - on the machine of course!

I also tried pleating and folding and tying in knots:

               Pleated and folded in triangles                       pleated then tied in knots

                                                 pinched in the centre and pleated

I did do some procion dyeing with thickened dyes and the leftover thin dyes - more about that another time.
On Sunday Lesley showed us how to practice batik on paper with leftover dyes. Then we moved onto fabric. I used silk paints on fabric I'd dyed pastel colours perviously:

This was done in a hoop and I painted random colours over the waxed pattern

 Here I wasnted the look of ripples on water. Pity about the blobs - perhaps I could paint them and turn them into rocks!

So a very busy but satisfying weekend. I'd really like to get on with lots of quilting using these but will I have time in the next couple of weeks?

Crazy sample finished

Well I finished my crazy quilt sample this week with lots of different automatic embroidery stitches sewn in a variety of threads. I must admit it looks so much better now it's finished and bound! I decided to go for a finished size of 8" by 11" for my emboidery samples as I think this will work quite well for my 'Yorkshire Landscapes' theme. I have plenty of ideas for the experimental pieces using an automatic machine stitch using pieced backgrounds. I've had to work on finishing my diploma books this week so haven't done any more samples yet. Hopefully I'll have more to show next week!

Going Crazy!

After ranting about how I didn't like crazy patchwork last weekend I decided I shouldn't be so negative and had a go at a sample today. I'm afraid it is the ugliest example you will ever see but perhaps it will look better when I've added some embroidery and binding!

I've also added a couple of pages to my sketchbook. The first is inspired by an article in the current issue of Quilting Arts and for this I used paint colour charts froma DIY store to make a mosaic landscape:

I really like this and would like to have a go at a quilted version. The second was just some simple string printing with 2 small blocks:

So I am making progress ....... slowly!

Here We Go!

Well we've completed our first weekend which was great fun but exhausting! Above is the view from college - unfortunately we moved classrooms on Sunday so we don't see this out of our window now but it is a lovely part of the world. In fact I love it so much I've decided my theme for the Research for Design module will be 'North Yorkshire Landscapes'. I'll be trying to use my limited artistic ability and a range of materials to explore images which could lead to quilts. I started my sketchbook off on Saturday with a photo and a couple of really simple pieces:

Photo taken at Brimham Rocks near Pately Bridge

Watercolour pencil sketch washed with water to blend the colours. Mary is much better at this type of thing than me. She did some wonderful paintings based on her photos of National Parks in the USA and very generously talked me through her method. I'll have to practise!

I painted paper with watercolours then tore them up and arranged them for this collage piece. I may draw some details on this later.

On Sunday we mainly worked on stitch samples for our machine embroidery module. Our tutor encouraged us to have a go at stitching with automatic machine stitches onto textured card which we'd coloured with wax crayon. Then we cut it up and pieced it with some painted cotton rag paper she'd brought along. Here's my 'crazy quilt'.

I was really pleased with this! I actually only used one feather stitch for the decoration on this (number 49 on my Bernina 440) but varied the length and width and used a variety of threads. I'll have to mount it on another paper as all our samples have to be the same size for this module. We have to make 3 samples to show how we have experimented with a single automatic stitch so I did start another piece using fabric. I'll show that when it's done.