Well, that meant that it was time to get into my dye studio- I had to use up the snow I've had in the freezer since last winter- time for snow-dyeing! It's also a great way to use up some left-over old dyes. While the colors may not come out quite as rich or vibrant, I'll always be able to over-dye or do additional surface design on the fabrics. So I prepared 4 separate yards of cotton, put each in it's own container, packed the snow on top, and poured 3 colors of dye onto each one. It looks like giant snow cones!
Ryan, my Viking warrior |
I've been working on encouraging my Mom to start back to sewing again, so she brought over her machine and a Christmas table-runner project which she had started. She was having some problems with mitering the binding. It's easy to get confused with a mitered binding if you are used to making a mitered border on a quilt. The process is a bit different, since you're turning the finding to the back side. She also some a 60 degree angles, which I admit I had to look up how to bind. Thank goodness for Google!
Once I had my Mom going, I started working on some freemotion quilting samples from the wonderful collection by Leah Day on her FreeMotion Quilting Blog. If you are interested in improving your quilting stitches, I can't recommend Leah's blog highly enough. Here is the "Calm Sea" design which I stitched this afternoon. I have several notebooks of practice samples such as this, which I keep adding to on a regular basis. Then, when I am ready to stitch a project, I can look through my samples and think about what would work best for the piece.
Tomorrow I'm taking off with my husband for a few days, so I've packed my sketchbooks and look forward to looking for new design inspiration, as well as working on thinking through some of what I'd like to accomplish in the year ahead.
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