How to Make a River

Pre-wash your long swaths of fabric, even if they are PFD (Prepared for Dyeing). There is still a lot of goop to get off of PFD fabric. I used 2 12-yard lengths and 2 18-yard lengths.
Prepare your dye. I used Setacolor, and used about 1 part dye to 5 or 6 parts water for this first wash. (Then about 1:1 for the accent colors.)

Using gloves, dip each section of the cloth into the dye. Dip a section, then pull it out of the dye, wrap undyed fabric around it and squeeze to get the excess dye into the undyed fabric. Having white patches is OK.

Lay out the fabric. Natural wrinkling will occur. Since Setacolor is photosensitive, the wrinkles will be lighter in color than where the fabric is flat. This makes for great water! I chose to lay the fabric in the shade so that the contrasts would be subtle (also I have a shady yard!)

Add bits of complimentary colors. My base color was Turquoise. I brushed on bits of Emerald and Cobalt with a 4 inch paintbrush. Pushing hard on the brush made interesting variations from the grass and rocks underneath the fabric.

Finally, sprinkle salt onto the wet fabric. This is a great addition to give it a watery look.

I added fish while the fabric was still wet. They looked AMAZING for the first 15 minutes, then began to bleed. What I Learned: Add fish after the fabric is dry.

Pay it Forward

It's 1:00 am and I'm blogsurfing because tonight I'm the Parent On Duty for our current Child Who Doesn't Like to Sleep Before 2am. I came across a neat idea on Terry's blog.

So I'm going to Pay it Forward, too. I'm adding a caveat for mine--this will be for the first 3 people who have never left a comment on my blog (Deborah and Jo, if you'd like something, just ask!).
Here are the rest of the rules:

I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this PIF exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week… LOL… but you will receive it within 365 days, that is my promise! The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.

And HEY! The baby's sleepy! Goodnight.

SoulFire

I have a wonderful friend who has the gift and the ability to be a fabulous hostess. She has given me use of her guest house on a couple of occasions now so that I can lead retreats there. She is also really digging into her spiritual life and exploding with all sorts of amazing insights and growth. Something she has recently discovered is her fire, both physically and metaphorically. So I wanted to make her something for the wall where she does her spiritual work.


I used these strips of color to symbolize the bits and pieces she brought together that formed the basis for her firey spiritual work. As the pieces were gathered, they grew.

Next, I placed the fire on a stary background. The background is quilted in 2 inch squares. This symbolized the straight and narrow background she came from before digging into her spiritual work. Up close, you can see that there is puckering and pulling (ie, this isn't the way things were meant to be).

And then, the fire begins! This is the first time I have used metalic thread, and I had SUCH FUN creating the licking fire. I really like the way the fire quilting turned out. I felt like I could create thread flames all day!

Dyeing fabric, take 1

I have never dyed fabric before. Actually, I am trying to paint raw silk using Setasilk from Darma Trading Co.
And this isn't just for fun in my spare time. Somehow I volunteered to paint 50 yards of it to use this weekend to change an old dining hall into a worship/gathering space. WHAT WAS I THINKING?!?!
Deep Breath.
OK. First things first, we should do some testing, right?
Alright. Let's start with one yard of raw silk (actually 1 yard washed and 1 yard unwashed so that I can decide whether it's really necessary to wash the other 48 yards).

Next, gather the rest of the supplies: Thinned paint, paint brush, gloves, cut outs for sun printing...

Paint fabric. Place in sun. Place cut-outs on top of fabric. Paint will leave the covered areas leaving white underneath the cutouts.

Wait.

After it is dry, take off the cutouts and...Ta Don't...sigh. That didn't work very well.
Back to the drawing board.

Learnings II: Just wait

A week or to ago, I posted about how I had ruined a nice little piece from Melody's workshop. Here it is:



Not so bad after all. Not a $750 collecter's item. But it would make a dandy coaster (for an oblong glass...)

Ironically, the same thing happened with my dog this last week. On the afternoon of the 4th of July, Roxanne began shaking as if she were incredibly afraid, wasn't able to control her limbs well, was jumping over imaginary things, listing to one side, and couldn't make eye contact.

I took her to the emergency vet and he thought poisoning, but gave her about 6 shots to cover many different things. Said she should probably be fine in 24 hours. She was better the next day, but all weekend she still would walk away from being petted, ignored food dropped from the table, did't wag her tail AT ALL for 4 days, and left a spot of pee every time she got up from laying down.

I made an appointment with our vet on Monday, fearing that there was no hope and I would have to find out more about euthaniasia and would have some really hard decisions to make in the near future. But when I got home to take her to the vet, she wagged at me and came over for a petting. I got her leash, and she about pulled me out of the door. She gobbled up cheerios from the car seat. My dog was back!
The vet said it was probably a Doggie Stroke, which textbooks say don't happen but he sees a couple of times per month. And she should make a full recovery.

Waiting is good.

Triangles (Not)

A few nights ago, both boys were asleep and my husband and I had a few free moments. He had the Tour de France on in the background, and I thought that I could do a few quick studies just to get my juices flowing.

I pulled out my fabric scraps and was draw to these three triangles:



I thought it'll be a nice exercise to come up with a quickie quilt using them. Here is what I came up with:


OK. Now I've got that out of my system, I'll Use Those Triangles. I was composing and talking to my husband about the Tour and watching snippets and came up with this:



I like it! Maybe it will be the first in a Tour series.
Now that I've got the basic fabric placed, where should I go from here? Do I need to add more elements? (I sort of like the simplicity...) Ideas on quilting? beading? or just let it be simple?
hmmm...

Felted Soap

We had young and old house guests this weekend. A whie ago, I learned how to make felted soap and thought that would be a fun project for the kiddos. So my brother-in-law, 3 kids, and I got the supplies ready: A bowl of water, a bar of soap, and feltable wool (from rough sheep not smooth alpaca).
To felt soap, you simply gently rub a thin layer of wool onto the soap, moisten with water, and continue gently rubbing until it becomes felted (you'll feel it go from furry to firm). When that has happened, you add another layer of wool perpendicular to the first and repeat.

After you've built up several layers of the felt and there are no empty spots, you can add colored wool to make a wonderful design.

Here's my brother-in-law's soap. He and one of the children are natural felters. The other 2 kids were a little young (3 and 4 vs 6). And I am sad to say that although I've tried several times, I am a horrible felter! I'm not sure whether it is that I'm too impatient, or I'm rubbing to hard, or what. I'm just no good at it. However, I LOVE the idea of it, so will continue to invite others to do it and be humbled at this thing I can't quite master.
Oh! And when it's all done, you simply wash your hands or body like normal with the felted soap. And as the soap shrinks, so does the felt. When the soap is gone, they say you'll just be left with a little felt ball for your kids to play with in the bath, or to play with in the park, or to slice thru to make buttons or flowers or do any number of things with. Our felted soap is still 98.3% of it's original size, so I can't speak from experience about this, but I'm looking forward to playing with the felt ball in the kid's bath.