Overdye and Quilt National

This morning, since I was up at 4:30 am seeing off my husband and son on their grand adventure to Boston, I decided to stay up and overdye some of the rust-dyed cloth that hadn't turned out as intense as I would have liked.

I used a variety of shibori techniques. I clamped several pieces, and I spiraled and scrunched others.

All of the fabrics had been washed in Synthrapol and dried before I set them up to dye again.

I mixed a little bit of cobalt blue in with the turquoise to dampen down the color a bit. The colors in the photos on my computer are fairly true. Who knows what will happen on yours?

For the top piece, I just scrunched the fabric a bit in the bottom of a gallon ice cream jug. I didn't stir it much, but again, the color is a little too even for my tastes. Where are my yogurt containers?

The second piece down is a bit of Radiance that I folded on the diagonal. I used two circles cut out of plastic ice cream lids and clamped them onto the fabric with clothespins.

The third piece is just a bit of 100% cotton that I spiraled the same way I would if I were doing a spiral tie dye design. Again, there is less variation in intensity than I would like. I think I'm probably using a bit too much dye concentrate, so I'll try less concentrate with the purple (4T to a cup for this batch, if you're keeping track).

The fourth fabric down was folded on the diagonal and then clamped with big binder clips. The bottom fabric was folded and then clamped with rectangular shapes cut from plastic and held in place by mini wood clamps.

I love the two colors, and in addition to lavender and rust, turquoise and earth tones were two favorite color schemes at Quilt National in Athens, OH. Once I'm done with this, I'm off to finish some rust I started this morning before heading out to Athens, hoping that some of it will not be very interesting so that I can overdye it lavender.

I put the fabric in the washer just in time to meet Pam out at Macy's car for a trip to Quilt National. The show was beautiful and rich and varied. I think 20% or more of the quilts used silk, and I noticed that whereas many of the quilts I see reproduced in magazines are heavily stitched, most of these quilts were stitched lightly, sometimes even invisibly.

There was a good deal of hand work, but some of it seemed to have been worked on the fabric before it was layered. Macy said that it seemed to her that many of the quilts used hand-dyed or hand-made fabric. I didn't notice it at the time, but I think, in retrospect, that she was right. Even if they weren't hand dyed, I did notice that many of the fabrics seemed to be more solid. I saw very few "quilting cottons" of the type you might get at your local quilt shop or crafts store.

Some of the most interesting quilts, to my mind, were ones that used transparencies in interesting ways. I also noted that a lot of the quilts were quilted and then somehow cut after they were made. Sometimes slashed, sometimes with sections cut away.

It was a beautiful show, very inspiring, and lunch afterwards at The Village Bakery and Cafe at 268 E State Street in Athens was a treat.