QAYG, Dyeing Fabric, and Stashbusting

Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 7:51 pm

The beginning of my hand-dyed fabric collection!

Here are the fruits of my dyeing labors on Saturday! It’s hard to see the yellow, but you can see a little mottling on the left. The light blue and green are solid, and the dark blue and the fuschia are both mottled. I’m really pleased with how well it came out.

I’m planning on trying my hand at batiking the yellow fabric with gel glue. You paint your designs with the glue, and then dye the fabric again. Then you wash the glue out, which leaves the designs in yellow. I think I’m going to cut the yellow in two. On one half I want to do spirals, and on the other little fish. I think I’ll dye the spiral one orange or peach, and the fishy one green or blue. But who knows what inspiration will strike down in my basement!

This fabric was white, with a white print. It's more purple than this. I wanted to show both sides of it.

The second picture is some white material that was printed with a white figure. I never used it cuz I like colors, so I decided to try dyeing it. Sorry the picture is blurry. I turned off the flash so it wouldn’t wash out the color, but for some reason, turning off the flash makes it hard to take a clear picture. It’s really a lot more purple than pink. I really like how this came out. I have lots more of this fabric, so it’ll be fun dyeing it different colors.

My first attempt at quilt-as-you-go!

The third picture shows another stashbuster I started working on yesterday. This strippy baby quilt surprised me by coming out as a square! I think it will finish around 40 inches on each side. I didn’t really know where I was going with this design, but I’m pretty happy with it.

The center section (four strips) is sewed together. I need to finish sewing the two triangular side pieces together. I’m trimming the sides as I join the strips. I’m not real happy with all the bias edges on the outside, but I stay-stitched them very carefully, which will hopefully keep them from stretching until I can do the quilting.

I’ll quilt the three sections individually, and then join them together, using the tutorial at Quilting Twin.

The next time I make this quilt, I’ll use a long strip instead of the squares, so there’ll be less sewing to do. But I still have oodles of pink squares left, so I wanted to use a few up! I may modify the design so that it’s a rectangle, too.

Working out this design took a little time, but I think it will go a lot faster the next time I make it, especially if I’m not dealing with all those squares.

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