Dyeing and Killing (a sink)

As many of you know, I went to Ricky Tims' quilt retreat back in September and began working on a very large quilt that I would like to enter into the AQS show at Paducah.  Unfortunately, Paducah's deadline is January 2nd, so if I do get it done, it will be done about twenty minutes before the deadline.  If I miss Paducah, I'll try for MQS or MQX later on in the year, or possibly the AQS show in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
In any case, the major obstacle to me working on my quilt (besides a baby and a business :), has been the fact that I needed to hand-dye all my fabric.  In the summer, this is not such a big deal for me because I use my greenhouse where I can slop dye around, wear my skivvies and generally not worry about making a mess.  However, dyeing requires it to be warm enough for the chemical reaction between the dye and cotton to take place.  My greenhouse is not heated and not insulated, so I haven't been able to get it done.

Luckily, my dear husband has been pushing me to get to work, so he said I could take over our laundry room.  This is actually ideal.  It's tile, has a drain in the floor, the washing machine is right there, and there's a nice big utility sink.  So I moved the cat food to another room, finished our laundry, and closed the doors for a Sunday of dyeing mania while dear husband watched little man.  I had already pre-washed my fabric, not so much for the washing, but to dry it on high and shrink it.  I don't want any shrinkage in the finished product because it has LOTS of curved seams, but also because I'm mixing 100% cotton with Robert Kaufman's Radiance, 55% cotton/45% silk, so there was a high potential for uneven shrinkage.

Then I soaked my huge piles of fabric in soda ash and lukewarm water.  How much you ask? A few scoops of soda ash and a big bucket of water.  That's how precise this step needs to be.  I used a fun tote/bucket that's all flexible and fun that I got at Target. 

I let that soak for pretty close to an hour.  It doesn't necessarily need to soak that long, but then I'm sure it's all saturated.  You should wear gloves for this stage and I highly recommend (with very blue fingers) that you purchase a nice, elbow length pair of heavy duty rubber gloves.  I used vinyl disposable gloves and they are terrible, and also tearable.  Hence the blue fingers.  

 

This is the result of about five hours of really messy, very physically intense work.  Before pre-washing my fabric, I measured individual pieces out for their places in the quilt, I tagged a corner with a sharpie and a number corresponding with the piece.  I then planned out (while my fabric soaked) exactly what color I wanted for each piece and how saturated (vibrant) I wanted the color to be and whether I wanted cotton or Radiance.  Ultimately the flaw in this plan is that once dyed, I can no longer see the numbers, making it a bit more challenging to assemble my quilt. In the future I will paint the number on the corner with white acrylic paint.  No matter, I dyed a significant amount of extra pieces so I would have some wiggle room as I pieced it together.  I also have plans for some related quilts, so having extra is a big fat bonus.  

As you can see from the picture above, I don't vat dye, per se, but I don't squeezy bottle dye either.  I mix my dye in some form of Tupperware, Gladware, Ziplocware, other random plastic containers that are cheap and disposable.  DO NOT USE metal.  The dye will react with the metal.  Ask me how I know. Luckily that disaster was early in my dyeing career, so I know better now.  I like disposable plastic because if I can't get it clean, I'm not out a bunch of money, but non-disposable Rubbermaid food containers seem the most stain resistant, so I'll let you be the judge. Anyway, I mix my dyes in these tubs, then I sqump (the technical term) my fabric around in the tub until I'm satisfied with the level of absorption, and then I let it sit in the extra.  Once I squeezed these pieces out, I put more fabric in to soak up more of the dye, but these pieces will always come out less vibrant because the little dye molecules have mostly bonded with the original piece. I also use a salt, perhaps Glauber's salt, whose name I can't remember, but is available from Dharma Trading Company.  This salt and dye do not get along.  This is exactly what I want for really vibrant, rich, saturated colors.  The salt pushes the dye into the fabric and out of the water since the dye wants to get away from the salt.  I have had the best luck mixing the dye, then adding the salt.  I found when I added liquid to the salt it crystallized into razor like chunks that guaranteed blue fingers.

 And some of the beautiful finished product!  They are very lightly mottled, some more dramatically than others.  This is the first batch I put through the wash.  I washed a total of about 20 yards of fabric at once, using Synthrapol detergent.  I washed this batch 5 times and then the water was clear (although it's hard to tell with that much blue fabric in a white washer if the water is clear or not).  The next batch had closer to 30 yds and I washed it about 6 before taking half out, washing the first half another 3 times before it was clear.  My last pile is still in the wash, and I will probably wash it 2-3 more times before I dry it. 

I'll post more once I have the fabric ironed and sorted so you can see the difference between the Radiance and the cotton.  I'm very happy so far.  I have a few flubs that I'll have to overdye or cut new pieces entirely, but mostly I got a lot of exactly what I was going for which is always a satisfying feeling.  I'll be bringing the whole lot to show and tell at LTQ's Block of the Month on Saturday, December 8th, if you'd like to see them and I'll be talking a little more in depth about my process.

The downside, and the Killing, of the dyeing process was that when I was getting ready to clean up Sunday evening, the drain and drain pipe of my laundry room sink, disintegrated, dumping blue dye and a whole lot of water all over my laundry floor, splattering me, my washer & dryer and generally creating a blue-sposion of staining power.  The sink died.  Then I got to spend a whole day contending with some very poor plumbing choices and trying to put the sink back together so I could clean up the room.  The plumbing took longer than the dyeing and was considerably less fun.

Happy Quilting!

Well, it's not exactly a book or product review, but since I so recently completed Starr Fabrics' Summer Solstice, I felt like I should start re-blogging with commentary on this fabulous, intricate paper-pieced beauty.  I started this in earnest in April.  I had done the cutting back in October, a couple of weeks before my baby was born, but that was as far as got until my spring quilt retreat.  It's done in a block of the month format, which in general irritates me because I like to chain, but for these particular blocks, it is a necessary and merciful way of doing this quilt.  For one thing, while many blocks are similar (there are four two-star blocks, six big 18" star blocks, four four-small-star blocks, and two long two-star sashing blocks), no two are exactly the same and chaining could get disastrous.  These blocks are also an accomplishment, and doing them one at a time keeps a person feeling capable.

The only error I found was in block #10, and there was plenty of scrap fabric to fix it.  The pieces went together beautiful and sharply, as paper-piecing should and the fabric, all hand-dyed by Starr Fabrics, was gorgeous.  It has a nice hand and prior to discovering Deb Karasik's seam roller, I finger-pressed everything and that worked great.

Now on to the pictures!  While I have significantly more hours in piecing, I feel that my quilting is what makes this quilt really mine.  This quilt is not a difficult quilt, per se, it is a long quilt.  It's kind of like getting a PhD in paper-piecing--you put in the work and you can do it and you'll be really good at paper-piecing by the time you finish.

 Here is the first row in these two photos.  I have a sort of stream-of-consciousness way of quilting that is hard for me to explain.  This is my biggest difficulty when teaching machine quilting.  I never know what exactly I'm going to put on any given quilt, often even as I go I'm not sure.  But occasionally I come up with one thing and wing every other element.  For this particular quilt, I was on a very tight deadline (I had three days to quilt & bind it), so I kind of had to gun it and not look back.  It took me about 30 hours over the course of those three days. The two things I decided on before I started quilting (and I'm talking 15 minutes before) were my border, which I did in large fluffy feathers in a rainbow of colors and unicorn horns.  The five outer big stars have different unicorn horns radiating out from them, you can kind of see the neon orange one in the top picture above.  The other one is the completed first row.  I chose to add a lot of loosey-goosey (that's the technical term) freeform feathers between stars.  I did this with matching blue So Fine thread.  Then I put Box O' Hair filler in around everything in matching blue thread. 

 This is the halfway point  The thread color of the border feathers is more dramatic in person, but not as pronounced as I'd hoped.  I used washable wool batting for this quilt and the wool quilts so beautifully.  I also put solid minkee on the back which looks awesome!

 Here you can see a little bit of the Box O' Hair which is kind of like McTavishing, but I'm just not very good at McTavishing, so it sort of morphed into its own thing.  You can also kind of see in this one, in each star, I picked one color (here, the orange) to do some sort of dense, intricate quilting.  Each big and medium star was different.  This gives it a really cool 3D effect.  The small stars just got the same swirly pattern in each one in a matching thread.

 Almost finished!

 More unicorn horns (in lime green) and some of the freeform filler feathers.

 The last row!  You can see the colors of the border feathers a little bit better.  You can also see the scale.  Since the border was very large and blended with the background combined with the 18" size of the big stars, I felt big and bold feathers were appropriate.

 On the table, pre-trim.  Note that my feathers all kind of flow down the quilt.  This is because I didn't mark anything, but also because of the summer sky aura, I wanted a flow-y, cloudy feel.

 Me in my booth that I busted my butt to finish this quilt so I could hang it!  Can you tell that paper-piecing is one of my things?  This was at the Missoula quilt guild's show.

 Another shot of some of the quilting and the complete kit in the foreground.

Freeform feathers in the center.  I tried to have them pass through the stars.

Next month I'll be reviewing Atkinson Designs new book, Graphic Mixx.  I've started, but I want to get through more before I release my thoughts!  I do have the complete kit at Little Timber Quilts and I will get it put up at www.ltquilts.com!  Don't forget to like Little Timber Quilts & Candy on Facebook!  Thanks for reading!  I'll see you next month on the 15th (I know I'm a day late and a dollar short this month)!  Happy quilting!

Been a long time....

Well, I won't say that I'm going to be back to blogging on a regular basis just yet, because I've got a bit more traveling to do before that will happen. I'm sorry to my readers that I fell off the map, but when Michael was killed in December, some part of me died too, and for whatever reason, I found it particularly hard to face a blank screen, to stare at the opening into the internet and put out my thoughts and musings on quilting at that time. For a time, everything in my life seemed so trivial and pointless and everytime I sat down to write about some quilting thing, all I could think of was him.
Here I am, six months later, and I am moving forward, albeit slowly, and while I manage my cheerful facade most days, the trouble with grief for me seems to be that it's sneaky, waiting for some seemingly innocent thing to remind me of the permanence of loss.
Many of you know, from my main website, www.ltquilts.com, that I have recently returned from a trip to Kenya with my mom and my husband. My mom and I have wanted to go on photo safari since I could utter the word cheetah, and we just never had. Michael's death made us decide that if you want to do something, and it really matters, sometimes you just do it, because life really is short, and you really never know how short until it's too late.
Kenya was magical and seeing such amazing creatures and such beauty was good for my soul. I could write for days and days about everything we saw and experienced, but I won't make anyone endure that.
So here are a few of my favorite pictures and a brief explanation of each.

These elephants were kind enough to stroll in front of the acacia trees and Kiliminjaro...More importantly, Kiliminjaro was showing her peak, a rare thing, apparently, and we got to see her both days when we were in Amboseli Park in southeast Kenya. We saw lots of beautiful creatures there, but the most memorable were the large herds of elephants.
This is another elephant from Amboseli. This was one of a very large herd that we happened upon around dusk on the road. They were all in good spirits and didn't mind us quietly sitting in our Landcruiser snapping photos...This female seemed to keep her eye on me, and she was "right-handed" though you can't see in the photo. Elephants have a dominant "hand" like humans, which you can tell because one tusk is almost always more worn than the other. They also curl their trunks that direction.
Hyenas get a bad rap, but I love them. This beauty just melted away into the grass at Amboseli, but she was kind enough to give me a couple good shots. Kenya has had horrible drought the past five years and last year they lost more than 85% of their livestock and vast numbers of wild animals as well. Many herds haven't recovered, and we were told that we were lucky to see as much as we did in Amboseli, one of the hardest hit areas. Predators suffered as much as grazers, so we saw very few hyenas, lions, and cheetahs, and we didn't see any leopards.

This is a pair of white rhino males fighting at our second camp, Lewa Downs. Lewa is a privately owned ranch that has almost single-handedly brought back both species of African rhino, the white and the black. It was my favorite camp. Our guide, Mungai (sp?!) was fantastic, the lodgings were wonderful, and the rest of the staff were great fun and so knowledgeable. The owners even eat meals with you! I will definitely be going back there someday! They have a marathon to raise money for their foundation (which in addition to conservation of wildlife, builds schools, clinics, and helps with all different resource management, including water). It's the only thing that has made me want to run another marathon. We saw tons of rhinos as they have excellent security and have been able to combat poaching more effectively that some of the national parks.
This is four of a group of six black rhinos we saw two days in a row at Lewa. Look at the horn on that mama! Black rhinos are aggressively anti-social and will charge just about anything (including cars and horses) and it is very, very rare to see them in any kind of group, so we saw something that the camp people said almost no one has ever seen. Lewa had horseback riding and our last morning, Erik and I went for a ride and came across the mother and calf on the right in the photo. They always either charge or run, and it looked as if she was going to charge, but if you hold your ground, often, they turn away, but if you run, they try to gore you. So, our guide on horseback, Romano, says to Erik, who is right behind him, "Don't let your horse run if she charges", to which Erik said, "This is my third time on a horse!" and started laughing. Luckily, she didn't charge.

These male cheetahs are Lewa's other claim to fame. My mom and I recently watched the discovery series "Life" (narrated by Oprah), and for those of you who watched it, you may recall the rare phenomenon of cheetahs hunting together and they had great footage of three male cheetahs bringing down and ostrich. These are two of the now quite famous "Three Brothers". Mungai tracked these guys ceaselessly because if I could only see one animal in Africa, I wanted to see a cheetah, and so he found me their famous boys. They were never nice enough to get all three together for one closeup, but I got some great shots of them (see below). One was hurt, but they said that in the past, the other two have always taken care of the injured one, allowing him to survive. Seeing these beauties was worth the whole trip.
Sleepy boy.

They just look like they're built for speed.
Looking for their next meal.
Our last day in Lewa, we were on our way to the air strip (a bit of flat land with a bit of gravel)
when we happened to see some very wary zebra. Wary zebra are usually a good reason to look around. So, upon close inspection and some creative driving by Mungai, we found a mama lion (not in the picture) catching her breath after taking down a warthog for her cubs. It was the best farewell (except for the warthog, too bad for him).
Finally, our last stop, the Maasai Mara. Our first morning on the Mara, our poor guide is driving us around, and he's new, only 2 years on the job, and we've seen a lot already, so there's less new stuff to tell us, and we're in grass that's thigh high and he gets a flat tire. No problem, one of the vehicles from one of the conservation groups comes along and helps because tourists are not allowed on foot in the parks primarily because with that grass, there can be a lion two feet away, and unless he wants you to know he's there, you don't. So, we continue on, and stumble upon a group of eighteen lions that we could see, feasting on a rather rotten dead hippo. Amongst those eighteen were the two beauties above, and believe it or not, there are two males behind them in the shrubs. Four big males. We're driving around to get a better look, and I feel a thump, lean out of the car and see yet another flat tire. My mom is ecstatic, because if we have to wait forty-five minutes for a car from our camp to bring us another tire (some vehicles are equipped with two spares, and now we know why) why not wait where we can look at lions. After quite a bit of chatter, she realizes that we are stranded amongst eighteen lions who can disappear at will, popping up somewhere else entirely, the soft breeze hiding their every movement. When the tire finally arrived, we had armed guards and a ring of other guide vehicles to protect our poor guide while he changed the tire. It's easy to forget, when you can drive right near wild, dangerous carnivores, that they are in fact killing machines. And lions are notorious for killing for fun. But we survived, hooray!
The coolest thing about our stay on the Mara was our camp, Olananna, is situated right on the Mara river. And I mean right on it. We had eight-strand, heart-attack voltage hot fence two feet off our tent's deck (yeah, our 'tent' had a deck, and a flush toilet--not quite roughing it) and we woke up to the grumpy harumphing of hippos as they got back in the water every morning. I love hippos! Here's one of the only shots I got of them out of the water as they are mostly nocturnal, coming on land to feed at night and staying in the water and resting and making noise all day.

Yeah, that is me feeding a baby elephant at an elephant orphanage in Nairobi on our last afternoon in Kenya. Go ahead, be jealous! They raise the survivors of poaching, and increasingly, babies that fall into wells and their mom's have to abandon them. They can guzzle a bottle in a few seconds, so it was hard to get a picture, but I got to play with them a little too, and one threw dirt at me with her trunk. One grabbed my hand with her trunk. It was really a phenomenal experience, and you can see that I am one happy camper.

And lastly, I can now die happy. I have been kissed, and thoroughly licked, by a giraffe. In Nairobi, there's a giraffe center that's for education, but also to breed the rare Rothschild giraffe and reintroduce them to the wild. This one, Laura, really likes pellets, and will eat out of your hand. They have tongues like boas--they are big, blue, muscular, rough, and always searching for food--I think our guide said their tongues can be up to 50lbs. Many a tourist seemed to find giraffe spit on their hand quite repulsive, but all the while, I was thinking to myself, "If I put a pellet between my lips, will she lick my face?" and sure enough, the guy working there sees my giraffe loving brain at work and says, "You want giraffe french kiss?" and sticks a pellet between his lips, getting a big ol' kiss. Needless to say, this is just one of about forty giraffe kisses I received, much to the horrified fascination of many other tourists, who might bravely turn their cheek for one. Interestingly, giraffe spit is anti-microbial because they eat so many sharp things--big gashes in their mouth can heal in fifteen minutes, so apparently, as dirty as I was, Laura was cleaning me up. Honestly, put this one on your bucket list.

So that is the brief overview of my trip. Hope you enjoyed, I might put up some more pictures as I go through all of them.
And as always, happy quilting!

Our puppy kindergarten graduate.

Look at those ears, looks like she's prepping for takeoff. Find her a mouse friend and call her Dumbo. She's mastered sit and stay, hates down, but does lie down, will roll over with treat enticement, bows like it's her job, and is learning to army crawl. Next we will train her to flap her ears on command. She also clocked in at just under 60 pounds at 4 months of age.
Happy new year, happy quilting!

Many thanks...

I wanted to thank everyone out there for all the sympathy and support in this very sad time in my life. I once again realize how fortunate I am to live in such a caring community, but also to be a part of the larger and nurturing quilting community. I hope everyone has a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Thank you all again.

Sad news.

Well, dear quilters and friends, I'm making this post primarily because I can't bear to give this news to so many people individually. My younger brother was stabbed to death outside his apartment last night at barely 22 years old. We don't know the details except that he's gone and it's not quite real to me yet.

Sorry for the absence.

I've been battling with some sort of flu, though methinks not swine flu, on top of having a puppy, for the better part of four weeks. I thought I was finally getting back on the horse, but last night I had a pretty good cough fest and have the wretched tickles in my throat that have plagued me throughout.
Anyway, the long and short is that I haven't sewn anything more exciting than a dog coat (Nova is naked, for all intents and purposes. I have more hair on my body than she does, and I'm basically hairless), which, while cute, doesn't seem to warm her up quite as much as I'd hoped.
I have many projects planned, some even cut, and glorious dreams of finishing a few things prior to Xmas, but alas, reality has set in and I know that I'll be longarming practically every waking hour until Christmas eve and I'll be pretty stoked if I even eat a sit down meal in that period.
I will try to get back on some sort of blogging schedule, but between puppy, work, and illness, I've just been overrun.
Hope all of you are happily quilting!