It started as White

 What do you do with all those beautify hand dyed fabric that you have on your fabric shelves.  All of these fabrics started out as white and were dyed in different classes.  I think they came from classes I took with Ellen Oppenheimer, Lynn Koolish, Jan Meyers Newbery.  I did not take enough notes during those classes.  I recognize batik, low emersion dying, acid dyes, procion dyes, stamping, shibori, ???

Do you see the blue shark?  There is a turtle in the design of the shark.  The brown fabric uses wooden chops dipped in wax.

This is a backing of cotton yukata of yellow butterflies.

I quilted the butterflies from the back.  This is how the quilting looks from the front.  Overall, I am very happy to finally use some of these precious fabrics.  

Katano Shibori

 Katano Shibori is a dying workshop that I participated in with Ana Lisa Hedstrom.  She introduced me to Acid dyes and machine stitched shibori.  This is the result of the 2 day workshop.  For the material list Analisa gave us different types of Silks to experiment on.  The border fabric comes from the raw silk, which had a rougher texture to it.

 I was fortunate to have silk samples that my friend Winnie brought me from her trip to Hong Kong.  It was the perfect size for this workshop.  Most of the silks were in pale yellows and pinks.  I had to prepare the silks by removing the labels and gum and lightly washing and drying them.

 The samples were folded in six and then machine stitched.  This was a pink silk that was put into a red dyebath.

 After Saturdays workshop, I went home and read the book SHIBORI by Yoshiko Wada.  There were a lot of inspirational photos.  I did my homework and traced some of the patterns onto the silk.  This was a light yellow that was put into a blue dyebath.

This was a pale green silk that was dyed in the green dyebath.

Lava flow

 This is a lap size quilt that I made using my hand dyed pole wrapped shibori fabrics. I pulled out all the pole wrapped shibori fabric and decided on 8 fabrics that matched the border Kaffe Fassett shot cotton.  I have made this pattern before and I was hoping to highlight the fabric.  I tried to make it look like it was flowing like waves.

This is a closeup.  I quilted it with a variegated Superior 40/3 King Tut thread.  First I drew the quilt pattern with a white pencil, then used the walking foot to quilt the pattern.  The last time I used this triangle pattern, I had a hard time with the bias and stretching.  I think the walking foot helped without too much distortion.