Sunday, October 21, 2007

Winter is here. . .

Well, we had our first real snowfall last night- woke up to an inch or two on the grass. We may have a few more days of Indian Summer, but not many.

I dyed the cotton sateen I bought a couple of weeks ago from Hancock's. It takes the dye beautifully, and I am thrilled to have another option for fabric dyeing. I love the sheen that the sateen has! I did drip pole dyeing, as Robbi Joy Ecklow describes in her book. Here's the three finished pieces- folded, you really can't see all the variations on each piece.


I did one all blue, with turquoise and three other blue colors, all single shade dyes. I got good color value variation- I often forget I need lights, I love intense color so much. The other blue piece has the same blues, but I also squirted some gray on it, to get some toned colors. Not a lot of difference, except I have the dreaded red dye pops in the gray areas. They are beginning to drive me nuts, and nothing I have tried to dissolve red dye has worked well.

The yellow piece is two shades of yellow- Dharma's lemon yellow, and bright yellow. Then I squirted gray on- I've gotten some fantastic greens with this color combination. Got those, and also lots of red dye pops- although in this case, I think they look kind of cool.

The last one is the four blue colors, then lemon yellow squirted on over them It has some lovely gradations to greens, depending on the blue it is over. Interestingly, I often wonder how I will bear to cut my hand-dyes- but this one is crying to be cut, it has some many color variations across the piece.

DJ and I went to Price to visit friends yesterday. On the way back, we stopped at a little graveyard on the west side of Spanish Fork Canyon. You would be hard pressed to believe the area had a thriving community back in the 1930's, but that is what the information there said. Now it's just a sad little monument to a community that has long since ceased to exist.


Here's one sign you don't see often! We weren't too worried, it was cold and snowy.



And, a reminder that life was often short.



We're off to Ikea this afternoon, I'm putting up a couple more shelves in the studio. I've been amazed at how the de-cluttering and rearranging has opened the space for me and energized me.

2 comments:

Nellie's Needles said...

Yummy colors! Are the raveled thread ends destined to my "ort" bags?

Beverly said...

Nellie, I now have a container in the wet studio expressly designated as Nellie's threads and leftovers- contents to be forwarded to you when it's full. I'll let you know! These pieces didn't shed too much, but there's some--