Carpe diem but which diem?

I awoke this morning with amazing opportunities before me. But it was such a long list that I as usual could never start down all those paths so I had to choose. It was similar to a day a little over a week ago when I woke up to this:

We had not had our usual amount of snow so far this season and there was always the possibility we would not have more, but there were many things beckoning to me, urging me to choose them to fill the finite amount of time provided me each day. I did choose other things for most of the day, including the requisite snow shoveling, but by late afternoon I headed downstairs to soak some fabric in soda ash to prepare for snow dyeing. 

The next day I had two interesting pieces of fabric hanging on the line:

In the one snow dyeing I had done last winter I had been frustrated with washed out colors that did not have as much texture as I wanted. But these were quite successful. I had seized a moment and the right snowfall cooperated.

A snow earlier in the month, a very dry snow that I thought would not work, produced fabric almost as successful:

And the middle piece is the product of an experiment.The Feb/Mar Quilting Arts issue ran an article by Susan Purney Mark about a shibori process that used a wine bottle instead of the long tube I was usually used and this process was perfect for seeing what would happen with shibori snow dyeing. 

The result looks very good, but I am not sure how different it looks from the regular shibori process. It is worth another try at some point. Ah, but that will depend on the whims of the weather gods, who seem to have gotten a bit confused about the seasons this year, and whether I seize that opportunity if and when it comes.

And if you have chosen to read this, thanks for the company!

I am linking this post to Off the Wall Friday. Take a look at some interesting in process and finished work there.

Of Snow-dyes and Silks continued

Sorry this took longer to continue than I planned. We got an extended visit from my daughter, son-in-law, and our two-and-a-half-year-old grandson as the flooded rivers in Pennsylvania and New York prevented their return trip home on Thursday and I was worrying about them on their second attempt on Saturday. But now they are safely back in their own territory and there is no one playing cars on the couch in our house when I come down the stairs in the morning. . . .

But back to my wall hanging that I left you imagining. I had thought about just sandwiching it and beginning the quilting, perhaps adding some kind of wandering pathway of quilting lines joining the three shapes with trees. But then I gave one more try at adding a pointy shape to all those rounded ones and knew I was on to something when I added a few triangles.

So here it is:

I finished it up by quilting around all the shapes and then adding some irregular horizontal quilting lines and some perle cotton on the triangles. It's about 17 x 27 inches and is called "Happenstance."  And so I did find something to do with that wild snow-dye.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Playing in the Snow

Now I know from my own experience that you just might be able to tell what kind of a day I am having by how my quilting stitches look.  If I'm uptight or just generally in a grump, they look different from when I feel like I am dancing in a pool of sunshine.  But it wasn't until this week that I realized you could tell something about people's personalities by how they piled up snow.

On Monday afternoon three artist friends (non-quilters) came over to try their hands at some snow dyeing.  The snow had been on the ground a long time, was wet from a freezing rain cycle that froze into a hard crust and from the melting  (sigh of relief ) that was going on, and was wetter still from a brief rain that morning. In other words, it was good packing snow.  We commented on the lethal snow balls it would make as we piled it on top of the prepared fabric.  "Just make sure the fabric's well covered with snow,"  I had said as we went out the basement door.

Inside again,we placed our bins on a table side by side and started laughing.  Linda, the careful, detailed graphic artist,  had shaped hers into a perfectly smooth bread-loaf mound:

Jen, with her loads of enthusiasm, had created a veritable Everest of snow:

Kathy, who is generally laid back but with a wicked sense of humor, had created a happy in-between:

And then there were mine, kind of lumpy and free form.  Not sure what they say about me . . . .

We found much to laugh about the rest of the afternoon, and I am not sure that the way the snow was mounded impacted the results much, although Jen did cut the top off Everest before she applied the dyes.  The wetness of the snow may have made a difference, diluting the dyes more than usual, since my fabric was not quite as vibrant or petal-ly as it usually is, but still interesting:

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

More Snow Experiments

Well, there has been snow on the ground for a while and so I had to put it to use.  It is a rather dry snow since the temperatures have been quite cold around here, and I kept waiting for a wetter snow, but finally gave in and started gathering my bins.

This year on the QuiltArt e-mail list, someone with the voice of authority wrote that to create fabric that looks significantly different from the regular low immersion dyeing, you must freeze your fabric before piling on the snow so I decided to give it a try, and here are the results:

The first is a mixture of cerulean blue and navy, the second dark brown, gray, and a bit of gold

Some diluted cerulean plus safari gray

And then I did another batch a couple of days later with unfrozen fabric:

This is kilt green (an older dye) with some ultraviolet and the next is kilt green, cerulean blue (a newer dye and more dominant) and a bit of gold

And here's my favorite:  ultraviolet and cerulean blue

Actually, I like them all and they all seem a bit different from my warmer weather dyes.  I'm not sure you can see it in the photos--perhaps clicking on them to enlarge them may help--but the unfrozen batch has this petal-ly, crystalline quality that I love in the snow dyes and the frozen fabric did not give that result, although that batch had these lovely lines of darker color so I cannot decide which batch totally wins out.  I did get more white spots with the frozen fabric.  To be honest, I was supposed to set the fabric out to freeze overnight again after I poured the dye on, and I forgot to do that.  So I guess that gives me a clear excuse to do some more snow dyeing.  We seem to be having plenty of nights cold enough to freeze wet fabric.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Fields

The work I just finished is a quiet one.  It doesn't have that visual impact that draws you from across a room.  First of all, it is small--just 9 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches.  The fabric is some of my less dramatic snow dyes and the pattern depends mainly on machine quilting and hand stitched pearl cotton.

I got the idea for this piece from one of my Doodle Squares.  I was just playing with filling the center groups of curved parallel lines and liked the final pattern--looked like hills or perhaps plowed fields or a contour map.

So I pieced the background and quilted three slightly different-sized squares and filled them with the curved parallel lines using a different variegated thread in each.  Using three different skeins of Laura Wasilowski's beautiful hand-dyed pearl cotton, I added V-shaped stitches to the top, little French knots with tails to the second, and then  random short straight stitches to the bottom square.

Obviously there is change going on in this work.  Seasonal?  Low to high elevation? My daughter said it reminded her of cherry blossoms.

This little wall hanging looks better up close and personal in real life.  Hmm.  And what does that mean?   I like looking at this piece, but is it of lesser value because it is not as photogenic as other works?  My immediate answer would be:  of course not! but perhaps the question is something I should keep in mind for a while as I look at other quilts. 

Anyway, if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Dialog

I have long been curious about what draws a person to a particular quilt--or any piece of art, for that matter.  The preferences many times seem to fall into two main camps, although these are probably just  the two dominant ends of a long spectrum of preferences:  the representational or the abstract.  All of us are drawn to the human face--I know there are studies out there that demonstrate this, but I'm not about to spend the time to search them out.   But our eyes seem to focus first on any faces that might be visible.  And our minds are always trying to make sense of our surroundings so when a quilt looks like something--a dog, a tree, a landscape--our minds probably heave a little sigh of relief that they don't have to work so hard figuring out what is going on.  So the popularity of the representational is easy to explain.

But that doesn't explain why I--and I know there are some others like me out there, although we definitely seem to be a minority--am drawn to the abstract. I spend a lot of time looking at pieces that play with pattern (not necessarily symmetrical) or color or shape and even enjoy the objects, animals, persons in a quilt more when they have become more abstract or patterned.  Even in Ireland, while everyone was commenting on the eight cute cows that were gathered at a stone wall, I was more interested in the patterns in the stone wall. But they got their revenge when I stepped in a cow souvenir, which was neither abstract nor representational but very real and very fresh.

I have just finished a piece (20" x 37")--well, it needs a hanging sleeve and a label--that is an attempt to think in fabric about this issue.  I'm calling it "Dialog: Pattern or Picture?" And anybody reading that hates quilts with a message or a long explanation attached should just look at and respond to the quilt and skip all the rest of this blog, although the quilt involves more questions than a single message for me.

This quilt began when I had a yard of my snow-dyed fabric up on my working wall last winter, as I waited for inspiration. One day I noticed close to the center of the fabric, a nearly perfect image of a butterfly.  --Oh-- I immediately said to myself --I'll have to use that somehow.--

A few days later,  I decided to get started.  As I thought about a plan for the piece and tried to decide exactly how much I wanted to cut around the image without wasting the rest of the beautiful green fabric, I began asking myself why this section of fabric with the butterfly on it was any more important than other sections where the dyes made beautiful swirls of color or deep pools of shadow or even another nearby fabric that exploded with shades of amethyst and light blue but never resolved into looking like "something." And then I realized the best use of the butterfly was in a quilt that explored this issue of the abstract vs. the representational.

I added the circle of pointed ovals at the top, a shape that, when flipped, becomes a leaf.  Is one more significant, more interesting, more valuable, more beautiful, more attention grabbing than the other?

Is a love for the abstract a cultivated taste, like learning to like cilantro, or are the taste buds of those who like the representational wired differently from those who prefer the abstract? Looking closely at master quilters or artists in other media as well as reading about art and taking art-related classes has probably given me a better appreciation of line, shape, composition, but I am not ready to accept that the study of art is the whole reason someone finds pleasure in the abstract.  I seem to feel that I liked looking at pattern and color long before I knew the name of Rothko or Mondrian.

Anyway, back to color, which is important in this quilt as well:  I chose a more solid hand-dyed blue to set off the busier green and amethyst snow-dyes, and some of Laura Wasilowski's great hand-dyed pearl cotton to do the hand quilting.

Now I'll see if my attempt at capturing a dialog in fabric works for anyone else besides me.  And if you're still with me, thanks for the company.

The Snow Dyeing Obsession

I wasn't sure I was going to do any more snow dyeing this season, but that beautiful foot of nice wet snow beckoned last weekend.   Plus my friend Kate wanted to try another round.  I tried a couple of new twists this time, (literally I did twist one piece of fabric) and here are the results.  All but the last were placed on hardware cloth above the bottoms of the trays so that they were not sitting in the dye as the snow melted.

















For both of these I treated the fabric with soda ash water and then froze it the night before.  Well, I intended to freeze it--left it out on the front porch and checked in the morning but after so many nights of temperatures in the twenties, it hadn't made it down to 32 degrees and so I shoved them in the freezer for a few hours.  Much has been discussed on the Quiltart email list about whether the fabric should be frozen or not.   So you can judge if it makes a difference.  The one on the right was a mix of brilliant blue, black, yellow, and plum; on the left deep purple and black.

These two were not frozen.  The one on the right is my favorite of this batch, although the photo did not pick up all the colors in it.  This is the kona cotton that I was complaining about in the last batch, but I am now sure it was the quality of the snow that made the difference there.  It is a mixture of fire red, moss green, and some other dye I thought was brown but was so old it was before I was labeling everything and must have had some blue in it.  The one on the right is just plain dyer's cloth with yellow, moss green and that undetermined bluish color.  Of course, if I was doing a real experiment I should have used the same colors on the frozen and unfrozen fabric, but I don't think the freezing made any difference.

This is my twisted experiment--I twisted the fabric instead of scrunching it.  The dyes were fire red, black, and a little plum.

And I had to try another folded piece.  The colors here are frustratingly inaccurate--sorry, but you get a little of the idea.  The dyes were moss green and yellow so the color should be a bit greener than it is. 

These are much richer results than what I got the second time I did this.  I was careful to use more dye and used it full strength so that might have helped but I think the quality of the snow has a lot to do with it.  This was wet snow, so packable it kept forming individual snow balls as Kate and I tried to cover the fabric in the bins.  

And if you want a more scientific explanation you can look at a book called Winter: An Ecological Handbook, which my husband handed me, after I kept remarking on what a difference the snow made.  In the book are twelve pages of charts and descriptions on how to classify different types of snow.  Fascinating stuff.   So many connections.

And I promise my next post will not be about snow dyeing. . . . 

Snow Dyeing--New Technique

Some snow dyers had been mentioning online that they don't let the fabric sit in the dye as the snow melts but raise it up off the bottom of the dye bin.  And they seem to get different results from what I was getting so I couldn't wait until the next snow to give it a try.  I scraped up some snow from the piles that had slid off our barn roof and that snow did pack a bit better than the dry flaky snow I had used last time.  And wow! the results were different:

 This was mostly navy blue with a bit of some old mist gray.  Click on the image for a closer view.

This is probably my favorite piece so far and I thought it was going to look like something the dog threw up when I was adding the dye.  I began with some old brown but realized when I emptied the bottle that, even  though I had shaken it well, it had not thoroughly mixed.  So I thought I would possibly save it with the kilt green I had just mixed for the last batch, but I ran out of that before the snow had been sufficiently covered with dye.  This was supposed to be an experiment so I didn't want to spend any more time mixing a new batch of dye.  After rummaging about I found a very old lemon yellow and when I squirted that on, it did not look very appealing.

Here are details of each so you might be able to see the crystalline petal patterns better:

For those interested in the technique I used, here are some more pictures:

I used 1/2" hardware cloth cut so that it did not fit all the way to the bottom of the sloping sides of the bin and supported in the middle so that it didn't sag.  

The fabric in this one is in an old narrow dish drainer--never throw anything out!-- with the snow mounded on top and you can see the side view below.

Even though it looks like the dye may not reach those side pieces, there were not white spots in the final fabric.

These were results significantly different from what I can get with my regular low immersion dyeing in the summertime.  Now for a project worthy of their uniqueness. . . .

Snow Dyeing II: The Results

So the fabric is washed and ironed, and here it is:

This is the purple/red mix, and as I was rinsing the fabric I kept saying to myself that it was really ugly.  But when it was ironed and up on my working wall, I discovered I liked it.  There is more white space on this and on others than on the first round of dyeing, but there are some very interesting parts here, particularly the watery purple areas.

This is bin B the stripes of blue and yellow.  Again there is too much white on this, but I like combination of the blue-green and yellow with shades of gold brown in places.

This is C, my experiment with tilting the bin.  I am assuming the darkest color was at the bottom of the tilt, but I am not sure why it faded to pastel.  There actually is no white space on this--the lighter areas are all tinted blue or pink.  This was done on Kona cotton from Joann's and it may not be mercerized.

This is Bin D and my concentric circles produced no discernible pattern that I can see.  No white space on this one, but I am not sure I like the color combination.

And here is my experiment with folding instead of scrunching, and this is a really interesting piece of fabric.   I like the suggestion of squares and the mirror patterns produced by the folds, as well as that watery, swirly feel to the coloring.  I think I will pursue some variations of folding in my next attempt at snow dyeing to see how the designs can change.

All in all, I think the denser snow of the last round produced better results, although I did learn some things this time.  

It Snowed!

Doesn't that look better?  Although we didn't get as much as predicted and nothing like DC is digging out of, we did get some snow to brighten up the landscape--and to use for snow dyeing.

A friend came over and together we prepared the fabric, packed snow in on top of it, and then squirted, dripped, and poured dye all over the snow.  While I am impatiently waiting for the fabric is warm up to room temperature, I thought I would record the first step of the process.

This snow was much different from my first experiment.  Last time the snow was old and had lain around for a while.  It was wet from melting a bit and so packed firmly over the fabric and the bins were heavy.  This snow was still falling as we used it.   Although it was quite sticky, it had a powdery, sparkly quality, like the Ivory Snow snow we used to make as children, as my friend said, and while we packed the bins full, they were still light and I could easily have carried four at once. It took the dye differently as well, as the dye immediately carved deep canyons in this snow, while it just sat on top of the other snow and then gradually soaked through.   This snow also melted much faster and was gone almost completely after six hours.

And here are the bins waiting to be rinsed:

This is bin A with deep purple and scarlet dyes.

On the left is bin D that was dyed with concentric circles of Brilliant Blue, Scarlet, Deep Purple, Brilliant Blue, Deep Purple.  I have a feeling that they all get mixed together in the final result, but this is an experiment.  On the right is bin B dyed in stripes of Lemon Yellow and Kilt Green.

This is bin C dyed with brilliant blue and mist gray with dots of amethyst.  My experiment with this bin was tilting it at an angle, which definitely resulted in some white at the top, but we will see if it produced any other anomalies.

And, last of all, is the orange tray that has more surface area than the other bins.  Instead of scrunching the fabric, I just folded it, not absolutely neatly, but with many less hills and valleys than the others.  If you have really good eyes, you might even be able to see the small maple leaf I managed to scoop up with the snow.  It's in the lower right corner.

So stay tuned for the results.  And I not only get to see my results, but my friend's as well--twice the surprise.