The "Naturals" Triad

I got these ironed yesterday, love the textures and color variations in each piece. I can't wait to start the "Earthy" triad - going to do that right now!!

Island Batik Donates $25,000 to AAQI!!

Hold onto your hats!

I know whose fabric I'll be looking for in the future!

Moira and Adam Dewar of Island Batik, Inc. have donated $25,386.00 to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative!


This is our largest donation to date. As in EVER!

Moira and Adam have been proud supporters of the AAQI through the Rose of Sharon project and have donated fabric for “Alzheimer’s Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope.” But this! OH MY GOODNESS!!!

Adam said, “We are very happy to give this money to the AAQI. We think they are doing fantastic work.”

We are ecstatic! Jump-up-and-down happy! Over the moon! THANK YOU!

There are an estimated 5.4 million Americans with Alzheimer’s. One in eight people age 65 has the disease. Right now. If you are a Baby Boomer, your age cohort is turning 65 at the rate of between 7,000 and 10,000 people a day. Chances are high that you will spend your retirement years either struggling with this vile disease yourself or taking care of someone who is.

Let Island Batik’s commitment to fighting Alzheimer’s be a challenge to every quilting industry leader to support the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. We fund research directly. 100% of the money that funds “our” research goes to budget, nothing to overhead. Our organization is run by volunteers and we spend zero money on fundraising. We are quilters doing what we love to do and making a difference. HELP US!

Time . . . . so fleeting!

I can't believe how quickly time is passing by. My son is graduating from 8th grade this week and will soon be off to (GULP!) high school. He was a baby not that long ago!

Needless to say, all this has kept me busy with all the preparation and events leading up to the actual graduation, but I'm in the studio dyeing as well. My favorite Canadian customer wants some rainbows ( I just love these! ) and she has a fondness for lime green, so I'm doing some yardage for her.


My studio renovation has stalled - things are crazy at work for both my husband and I so our free time (ha!) has disappeared - hopefully things will get back on track soon so I can get some sewing done! One good thing that comes with graduation . . . the school auction comittment is over for me, turned over to other hands!

One fun note: My sister Diane and I are going to the taping of The Quilt Show in August in Bolder, CO with Ami Simms. Should be fun - we're talking about making a road trip out of it which could be quite an adventure! Will keep you posted!

We got a little more snow, so . . . .

I went out and scraped up enough to do 7 more pieces of snow dyed fabric. Is the suspense killing you too? I hate the waiting part!!


That top right one could be another potentially "ugly" piece, but we have to wait and see. The bottom two on the right side look scrumptious!


I had a lot of green dyes mixed that I wanted to use up, so there's quite a lot of green in this batch. So many of the other pieces sold that I figured I'd better make some more. I'll post the results just as soon as I can . . . until then, enjoy your ride on the magic carpet (post below)!

One World One Heart

This initiative is really fun and you are exposed to blogs from all over the world . . . and they are reading yours too! If you are not familiar with OWOH, read all about it here:



My give-away is pictured below, it's a silk scarf hand dyed by me in purple and turquoise. It's a two step process with special dyes so that part of the scarf takes one color and part takes another color. It's something I've been experimenting with, and it gives great results! The spots are velvety and the purple background is sheer. The scarf measures 68" x 13" and is soft and dreamy!


The fine print: You MUST have an active blog. You MUST leave a comment on this blog entry - and that post has to include a way I can contact you if you win. You can leave your email or you can leave your blog address (but make sure your email or contact me info is current on your blog!).

THE END - yes, all good things must end - is on February 15th - the day the winners will be posted. So the cut off for comments on my blog will be midnight on the 14th. I'll use a random number generator to pick the winners.

*****************************NEWS FLASH*****************************

Because of the overwhelming response to this scarf, I have decided to give away a SECOND scarf! Your odds of winning just went up, so keep on clicking!!

And since we are well over 200 comments, I'll give up my THIRD and final scarf and this one is different than the other two. Tell your friends!

Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for all the wonderful comments!

What a difference a day makes!

So, I created a snow dyed fabric that I LOVED, and I sold it! I thought that I could re-create something similar, since it was the same snow, same fabric and same dyes, but it didn't work out quite that way.

I think the results are different because the temperature of the snow to start with was different (warmer), and it wasn't cold enough out to freeze the fabric before I packed it in the snow. I didn't think that was a big factor, but now I'm not so sure.

Here are three pieces of fabric that I put under snow, on two of them I used the exact same violet and the exact same yellow as #41 (see previous post) and on the third I used chartreuse in place of the yellow. For the life of me, I can't be certain which one is which, and I find that extremely odd. Again, the serendipity of dyeing!

So here are the three pieces, these are full shots of each piece which measure ~39" x 44". The line across the center is the pressed in fold line from my mangle. They're absolutely gorgeous in their own right, but completely different than what I was trying to get! They actually are similar enough that you could use all three together if you needed more yardage for a project. Click on the pictures to get a closer look.

Did I mention that these are for sale? $30 each, should be on my website soon, but if you can't wait, just let me know.


*****************************SD#42


*****************************SD#43


*****************************SD#44****SOLD!!****
All of this just makes me want to make more!!

Even MORE Snow Dyes!!

I loved the first batch so much that I started a second, and WOW - these are great too!! Now we're having a January thaw, so it'll be a while before I get to do more.


SD#41 - ****SOLD**** (No one can believe I sold this one - Chris you are one lucky gal!)

SD#40


SD#39 ****SOLD****


SD#38****SOLD****


SD#37


SD#36


SD#35


SD#34

All of these will be for sale (maybe, I LOVE #41) on my website in a day or two.

If you missed my tutorial, go back a couple of posts and you can see how I make these.

Happy dyeing!!

Snow Dye RESULTS!!

Here are the results from yesterday's snow dyeing. The pictures only show about a quarter of each piece, maybe a little less. These will all be for sale on my website (see sidebar for link) later today or tomorrow. If you just HAVE to have one of them, please email me right away and I won't bother putting it on the website. Use the numbers below each picture to identify it. Each piece is ~39" x 44", 100% Pimatex Cotton, high thread count, and will sell for $30.


SD#28 (much brighter greens IRL)****SOLD****


SD#29 (The one I thought would be "ugly" - not so bad, eh?)


SD#30 *****SOLD*****


SD#31 (This one is SO much brighter that the picture shows.)****SOLD****


SD#32


SD#33 *****SOLD*****

So I decided to do 8 more today, they're slowly melting . . . will show the results as soon as they're ready!

My Version of the Snow Dye Process

So, we've had a LOT of snow. What to do? What else, dye fabric in the snow!! This was really the perfect snow for dyeing - not too wet, not too dry, just right!


I grabbed some of my dye bins, soda ash soaked some PFD fabrics and wadded them up into the bins:


At this point, some people let the fabric freeze, but not me - too impatient! So I packed them all to the brim with snow. (NOTE: I have since found that freezing the fabric first does have an effect - you get much crisper lines in the finished fabric as you can see from my subsequent blogs where I did freeze the fabric.)


Then I brought them inside to my wet studio and squirted dye on the snow. I used 2 colors on each, mixing them up with the 5 colors of fiber reactive procion dye that I had mixed. The dyes were Lemon Yellow, Brilliant Blue, Pagoda Red, Ultra Violet and Forest Green. I tend to choose dyes that are mixtures of color, rather than what they call "primaries" so that the colors come apart on the fabric and give some really unique results. Here are the fabrics after I put dye on them:



And here they are melting . . .


You can see the dye start to wick down into the fabric:


And melting . . .


And more wicking . . .



Over half way - this takes probaby 6-8 hours to get it totally melted.


And I took these just before I went to bed. The snow is nearly gone. I thought this was going to be a rather ugly piece from looking at this, but it's NOT!!


Here they are totally melted. I let them sit like this till they're room temperature, (or 24 hours, whichever comes first!) then rinse them out by hand, then they go through 2 super hot washes, the first with synthrapol in my dye dedicated top loader and the second in my front loader with regular detergent and fabric softener on the sanitary cycle. They're in the wash now, so as soon as they're done and I can iron them, I'll post pictures of the results. Stay tuned!!



(Yes, that's the "ugly" one!)

What I've been doing lately . . .

Things have been getting done in the studio renovations, just not the types of things that make for good pictures, so I decided to show you my ironing station where I have been spending a lot of time lately.


This is my mangle, for which I am eternaly grateful and which for now is tucked into a corner of the basement during renovations. I have a little TV where I can watch DVD's which keeps me sane during hours of ironing.


This is the first stack of 48 yards that I ironed on Sunday.


This is the complete stack of 96 yards that I finished yesterday. Sorry the picture is a little blurry - it was late and I was rushing to get to TKD.

All of this fabric is headed to Alberta, Canada, where a talented lady will turn it into beautiful quilts. She now has a nearly complete palette of my hand dyed fabrics. Funny - she has more of my fabric to play with than I do!!

Cotton/Silk Comparison

Here are pictures of the cotton that I dyed along with the silk. There's the picture of the whole piece, both scrunched and pleated, and underneath that, a close up of one part of the piece. To me, it's amazing how very different they are - the fibers take the dye in a completely different way. These were odd size bolt ends that I dyed, so I get to keep them - yippee!









I'm also undergoing a major studio renovation, taking over some space adjacent to my current dye room and cutting room, so I'll be posting updates of that process as well.

Silk Revealed

So here are the results of the silk dyeing mudbath. These are just 2 pieces with close ups of parts of them - I dyed a large piece, then cut it into pieces approximately 20" x 40" for sale. Pretty, huh? Each piece is unique and as such, sold on a first come, first served basis through my website.




The colors are so much richer in real life - they're really gorgeous! I also dyed some cotton along with the silk, and the results are different again. I'll try to get those pictures up tomorrow.