Snow-dyeing

With a good bit of snow available lately, I've tried some snow-dyeing. The first two attempts resulted in nice patterning, but the color was not successful. The piece on the left was a mixture of brown and black dye, but the result was a brownish purple. The piece on the left was black alone, a different black dye. Turned out a nice blue. OK, so maybe black doesn't work very well with snow. . .

More successful in terms of color was a piece dyed with teal and green, to use as a backing for one of the zig-zag baby quilts. Here's a detail:

Unfortunately, the pattern of color across the whole piece was not as successful.

Snow is melting this week; I'll try some more with the next snowfall. It's nice to have a reason to be glad for snow!

Trial and error

I'm not 100% satisfied with how I've done the finish of the strata that end mid-tier. In the turquoise section, I used a "blunt" finish, slightly curved, which you can see in the left third of the turquoise section above. I've tried something else in the orange-red tier. One finish, about a third of the way in from the left, is slightly "stepped" rather than curved; hard to see in the photo above, a bit more visible below. A second is done with a series of points, readily seen below, towards the right edge of the photo.

I was excited to try these other methods, but, in the end, I think I like the blunt end better.

Shelter--a preview of the whole

Blue and turquoise tiers are pieced and basted. Strata for orange/red are pieced and pinned on the design wall--more manipulation of the pieces to be done to break up the lines. Black is just one piece of fabric put up for the color--piecing of many blacks into strata still to be done. The black tier will be larger than it appears here and the orange/red smaller. Size = about 60" wide.

Zig Zag quilts

I spent the weekend making a couple of zig-zag quilt tops, thanks to a tutorial by Amanda Jean of Crazy Mom Quilts that shows you how to do it all with rectangles rather than triangles. The top is about 36x39, made for a baby quilt.

Here's the top before cutting off the extra points all around. Looking at the top 2 rows shows how it is made up of blocks constructed from two rectangles. (These are cut 3 x 5.5".)

And a close-up to see how the rectangles turn into zig-zags. The key is turning the blocks on point. (The colors are truer on the close up shots--bright pastels. The fabrics are from Funquilts.)


Here's another I made--actually the first, as it follows the tutorial, alternating the same solid fabric between patterned rows. Makes the cutting a little easier, but I like all patterned better, though this will look better once the binding is on. I'm thinking to do another one with all solids, bright colors, each row different.

The quilt is very easy to put together. On my second one I got careless, though, when I went to cut off the triangles on the first edge, and angled the cut into the second row. I was tempted to make the whole quilt smaller, but I took the high road--undid some blocks, made up substitute ones and pieced it all back together.

And a little handquilting

This is a small quilt, 20x28--a nice size to hang on a door. You can click on the image to enlarge it for a better view of the quilting. Here's a detail of the colored rectangles; the thread is YLI silk 1000 denier.

This is one of a pair of small quilts, in which I was playing with magenta and its friends. Here's the other.

Construction of the orange-red tier of shelter is coming along quite well. Another couple of days of piecing and I should have enough strata for this section.

Genealogy of a Quilt-2

Back in this post I wrote about a quilt top pieced with rectangles that combined fabric from two ideas--thinking about a pine grove and about stones. Over the last few days I've pieced a back for that quilt. I incorporated the stone-blocks in the back, and decided to slice through the largest ones (that looked more like dinosaur eggs than stones). The photos above show details. Here's the full back:
I like it.

Turquoise scraps

This is a 4" coaster, made with scraps from the turquoise tier of "Shelter," along with some of the orange-red that will go in another tier. Tomorrow I'm going to start strip-piecing the orange-red fabrics.