More snow

We've had more snow in the midwest this week, so I took advantage of it to continue with snowdyeing. I'd like to build up a reserve of pieces that I can use as backs for baby quilts. Above is a detail of a piece done with coral and teal dye, plus a little dusty lavendar/rose. The coral and teal are complementary colors, so there's also brown where they mix. I wondered if it would all turn a muddy color, but it didn't. Below is the beginning of the process, the dye squirted onto about 5" of snow, which is sitting on top of the fabric, which is on a cooling rack, which is sitting in my basement sink.

Here's the whole piece of fabric, about 42x46". More white than I wanted, and big blotches of coral. Well, maybe this one will get cut up instead of being a back.

A second piece was done with just two dyes, blue and yellow. The green you see is from the dyes immediately mixing together.

They mixed so much that the piece is a definite study in green, with only one spot towards the bottom where the yellow remains on its own. I think this one will make a nice backing.
And a couple of more details from the first piece:

Time for Black

I've finished piecing and basting the orange-red tier of "Shelter" (photo at end of post), and am now moving on to the final tier of black. Each tier has posed new challenges--up to this point all issues of construction and piecing. For the black tier, the challenge is in color/value. The blue, turquoise, and orange-red tiers have used variation in value (and to some extent in color) for contrast within the piecing. But lighter values of black would bring in gray, and I don't think that belongs. So I'm going to try variations in texture, variations in color (blue/black, brown/black), and a very little bit of variation in value to dark gray. The very dark black in the photo above is velvet, which I got for texture, but it also does value. In the photo below, you can see a bit of the brownish and bluish batiks as well; for some reason everything except the thin bit of velvet looks gray here, but they are black in real life.

And here's a shot of the orange-red tier, with one strata of blacks up against it for a glimpse of what is to come:

Solids

I decided to try the zig-zag pattern with solids; another baby quilt, 36x39. I have a large stash of solids and I thought I'd be able to pretty randomly pick 12 colors, but it wasn't so easy. I'm happy with the mix I chose. Amy Walsh has a great pattern with all solids ("Color Cues") in the April 2010 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting, and she comments in the article that "there's no substitute" for working with solids "when it comes to practicing your color expertise.

Then I decided to play with the scraps that I got when trimming the edges of the quilt. I had to make up a couple of blocks new to go into the piece, and I would have had to make a few more to get enough choice to be 100% satisfied. But I decided that 85% satisfied was good enough for this one below, which is 12x12. (The chalk marks are left over from marking the quilt--they'll come out easily.)

Since I started dyeing my own fabric, I've been less drawn to commercial solids. The colors seem somewhat harsh to me (because of the total uniformity of color), and the most readily available solids for the retail buyer are Kona cotton, which is heavier than I like to use. But it was good to come back to them for these projects. For brights and contrast, they're a great choice.

Another option for solids is shot cotton, which is a much thinner fabric (works even for applique), and which has a softer, more complex look than the solid Kona cottons because most pieces have a different color for the vertical and horizontal threads. This is the fabric I used in the "Spectrum" quilt. My sister was interested in a wall-hanging similar to this quilt, so she bought me a great collection of 60 different Kaffe Fassett shot cottons, 1/4 yd each, and I get to make quilts! Thanks, Cookie.

You can see the shot cottons, along with other beautiful fabric at the "Glorious Color" website.

And then there's the option of using fabric I dye myself, but I've got to do a lot more dyeing before that happens. . .

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.