All Things Bright and Beautiful…more spirals.

I finished doing the spirals for my June spiral swap yesterday. It’s finicky working with small pieces of fabric – about 11″ x 14″. I used tweezers to grab the middle of the fabric so I could turn it and then held the fabric with elastic bands instead of doing it in the bowl like last time. The result was a tighter spiral. I also for the most part used a few 10ml syringes to apply the dye. I had better control but it took forever to keep filling them up and using them. All done though and here are the results:

Spirals.

More spirals

Final yellow and golden yellow spiral.

And then from my garden:

Just to prove that I did indeed get some berries from the garden this year. A mad fight with the chipmunks to see who gets the ripe ones first.

Karen

Colour Wheels Mounted

I spent a good chunk of yesterday mounting some colour wheels I had done from a colour study last year onto paper. Most of the girls in my group use card stock but I have to admit that I just use paper. One of the girls in the forum had created a really neat file for mounting these wheels and I started off using her form for the first wheel but basically I’m a lazy writer and wanted to type in my information so I ended up creating a new document in Word, which turned out easier than I expected. The original form was pdf and I don’t have adobe so had to create a new doc file using Word.

Susan’s idea was to attach iron-on adhesive to each square and then iron the colour wheel onto the paper/cardstock. Wonderful idea and it works brilliantly. I started off using some “steam a seam 2″ but ended up with “heat and bond” for no other reason than the “steam a seam 2″ cost major bucks. I’d bought some of this at the fabric store with a 50% off coupon but even then it still cost over $6 a metre (Needless to say it sells for $4 in the States without the 50% off.). The heat and bond was still expensive but at 50% off was the same price for 3 yards and it was wider. I’m sure it’s less expensive in the states as well. Needless to say I found the “heat and bond” after the clerk had already cut the more expensive stuff.

Anyhow they both worked well but I have to admit that if you’re into applique the “steam a seam 2″ is fantastic stuff. It’s tacky on both sides so that you can stick your fabric to it and if you don’t like where you’ve positioned your piece then you can lift it off and reposition, wonderful stuff but expensive.

Here are some photos I took of the colour wheels, unfortunately they didn’t turn out all that great I don’t know why. I tried to adjust the lighting but they still turned out on the dark side, my lack of camera expertise I guess.

Colour wheel assortment I did using fuchsia, cobalt and golden yellow. The dark, medium and light value colour wheels are on the top and the three colour wheels on the bottom are dark, medium and light as well but with black, brown and grey additives.

Dark colour wheel closeup.

Light colour wheel closeup.

Light colour wheel with grey additive using old form.

I was hoping to get all of my colour wheels done yesterday, big joke as I managed to mount 18 out of the 55 wheels that I have. Could be a long process.

Karen

More Amish Diamond Squares

I finally got around to finishing some of the Amish Diamond squares for the block swap I’m participating in for the month of July.

The colours used are Jaquard ultra violet, Dharma ivory (at more then the recommended strength), Prochem’s boysenberry and the green is one I made myself mixing lemon yellow and one of the blues I have, can’t remember which. The black is Kona black.

Amish Diamond squares.

I had participated in this swap last October but there weren’t that many people so our group decided to repeat the swap. Hopefully with these additional squares I’ll be able to make a small quilt. If I don’t have enough then I’ll just raid my stash and make some more. I might just do that to colour balance what squares I end up with.

Karen

18-step Colour Wheels

I’ve been busy doing stuff like gardening and reading and fabric dyeing over the last little bit, nothing to really blog about but I thought that I would post a couple of pictures of two colour wheels that I recently did.

I drew inspiration for the colour choices from the ProChem website and their gradation kits. I didn’t follow their instructions for the 30-step gradation but rather did an 18-step colour wheel using fat eighths and my own dye formulas so the colours I ended up with were slightly different than those pictured on the site.

The first colour wheel I did was called Flower Garden:

Sapphire – Boysenberry – Tangerine

The second colour wheel is called Autumn Blends:

Turkey Red – Butterscotch – Olive

The Flower Garden wheel used full strength dye so the colours were quite intense. For the Autumn Blends wheel I backed off and used 2 tsp of dye per cup and a half of water. I was happy with both of the colour wheels but I’d already done several jewel tone wheels before so the Autumn Blends turned out to be my favorite this time around. The wheel really does remind me of the mix of leaves that you see in autumn – yellows, reds, oranges, greeny browns, browns and reddish browns – very nice.

Karen