Design wall Monday 2-21-2011

I finally have something different on my design wall. Though I am still working on the opportunity quilt for my guild. I will show pictures of that also later. This quilt is my class quilt for the Quilter’s Academy class that I will be teaching in March.  It is the first quilt in the second book. A fairly simply quilt, more nine patches with solid blocks in between them. The fabric is some of my hand dyes that I did last summer in playing with a kit that I ordered from Pro Chemical and dye, to learn how to do hand dyed fabrics.  It totally is not my colors, but I like the change from blue and yellow for now. If I don’t like it when I get finished I will put into the pile for charity.
For the other quilt that I am working on, you may be interested to know that I have all the blocks together and working on the pieced border now. I hope to have the top completed by the end of the week and ready for someone to quilt it. The only problem is that I am not sure if I should use the gold, yellow or orange accent border. I would love to hear what others think. I will show the complete quilt next week.

If you want to see what everyone else is doing, hop over to Judy's blog and see what is going on.

I think I got it!!

I did another gradation yesterday. This time only 1 1/4 tsp. of dye in a 1/2 cup of water. You can see the gradation came out better. the first two are close to the same. The middle two are about the same value and the lightest two are close to the same.  In real life you can see the graduations better. I think one reason for the little difference in  gradations values is because of the color I am using. Some colors dyes I have discovered do better gradations than others, also the different variables like water amount and estimating dyes volumes plays into the equation.

I was also playing around with the photo on the computer. I discovered that if I take the color out and have a black and white picture you can see the texture of the fabric. Cool hah!!

I might try to do a different gradation color this weekend to see how that comes out. My time is premium for me now. Doing class samples and organizing my lessons plans makes for doing two jobs.

Till next time

Cheryl M.

Hand dyes

Last May I started to learn how to dye fabric. This has been a real learning experience. The quilt that I have been showing on Design Wall Mondays for the last three weeks is all done in hand dyes to get the correct shade of colors. I do pretty good in following the instructions on Pro Chemical and dying website and a couple of books that I have. All of the fabric pieces that I have done so far have been 1 yard or more cuts. My problem is that I want to do some 6 step gradation using only FQs'. The reason for doing only FQs' is that I like to do scrappy and applique quilts and large yardage would most likely sit in my stash. Plus I only have so much room and money to experiment. I did a couple of colors to see how they would come out. My 6 step gradation come out to have only 2 gradations in color in IMHO. I think that I am using to much dye for the concentration of water ration. I use 2 tsp of dye to 1/2 cup of water and keep adding 1/4 of water back into the mixture of dye of the next step. As you can see the first 4 FQs are very dark and the 6th step is lighter in shade. If someone can till me what I should be doing for FQs and not whole yardage I would greatly appreciate the advice.
Cheryl M.