MILLYPENNY

I spent the weekend down in Cork at the Cork Textile Network's 2013 Conference - which was great fun. The lectures were really interesting; there was lectures from Freddy Robins, Liz Nilsson and Debbie Symth. As part of the conference I did an Indigo Dyeing workshop with Liz Nilsson . Always wanted to do indigo dyeing, even have a kit for it (but have never got around to using it). So this was the perfect opportunity to try out indigo dyeing. Some of Liz' lovely indigo dyed fabrics The first part of the workshop dealt with setting up the indigo baths, measuring how chemicals and how to fold, clamp fabrics etc. Indigo vats  You could try out endless ways of folding material and clamping. Different pegs also gave different resist effects. Add a clamped piece of fabric into the indigo vat    On the 2nd day we got to dye fabric and add printing and stamping if you wanted. I didn't bother doing any printing at this stage, just kept on with the fabric dyeing.

Last month I did a "Cut and Come Again" workshop with Edwina Mackinnon . Edwina was the guest speaker at the February Mid-West Branch meeting. The workshop was good fun and a great way to use up scraps. For my piece I decided to use creams,whites and gold with a few red accent pieces.  My piece is still in progress (only have about 60 squares made so far), have to make a good few more squares to bring it up to quilt-size. I'm trying to get a few UFO's finished first, so it will be a few months before this quilt is done. Cut and Come Again squares

I'm currently working on a Graffiti quilt for a free-form round robin project I'm doing with two friends. I needed some distressed-type fabric for my initial/starter block and decided that some rusted fabric would be ideal. So got myself a few pieces of cotton fabric and made up a simple solution of water and vinegar. I had bought a small roll of fine steel wool in a local hardware store last week, so was all set to go. You could see the steel wool start to rust a few minutes after the vinegar solution was added. I took the fabric out after a day in the water/vinegar solution, as most of the fabric was nicely rusted and I didn't want it to go to far. I'm going to be doing a bit more fabric rusting this weekend. I'm going doing an indigo dyeing course next month, and want to have some rusted fabric ready for it. Just curious to see what effect indigo will have on rusted fabric.