A Detour

I took some time off this weekend from dyeing scarves and dyed fabric instead. I needed some fabric for my next Hawaiian quilt and I wanted to get started dyeing some fabric to sell at Quilt Hawaii in July. Sometimes I use Hoffman PFD fabric but I had a lot of mercerized and bleached cotton print cloth from Testfabrics so that's what I used. Its a great fabric for hand quilting and it feels almost as nice as the Hoffman. The Hoffman is my favorite for it's silky feel and the tighter weave which gives you more intricate patterns (at least in my experience)

I prewashed the fabric and cut it into 3 yard pieces before I started dyeing. My favorite process is to include lots of different color families in a single piece of fabric but it's not always what you want for a quilt, so this time I did one color family per piece. I used lots of different greens for the green piece, purples for the purple piece, etc. This way you still have to feel of a one-color fabric but you have lots of variations in that color family.

My friend Amy, who is a fantastic Hawaiian quilter, joined me to dye some fabric for her next Hawaiian quilt project. She wanted to make more yellow and then overdye some greens that she had dyed before but were no longer the color she wanted. 

I needed to dye fabric for a Hawaiian Quilt because I am the facilitor of a Hawaiian Quilting group that meets once a week and I haven't actually done any quilting there since the fall. So I decided it was about time to set a good example and start on my next Hawaiian quilt.

I had a pattern in mind - an Angel Trumpet designed by Meg Maeda in Tokyo. (see above). The pattern is called Swaying in the Breeze and it has a wonderful soft, curvy feeling.  The problem was I couldn't decide on a color. So at the end of the day, after washing, dyeing, washing again and ironing my new fabrics, I pulled them all out and decided the green one was speaking to me. So it will be a green applique on a solid white background. You can see a photo below of the fabric cut out and waiting to be basted to the background. Not a good angle for a photo but you can get a feel for the color. When I dyed the fabric I used a bunch of different greens and just squirted them randomly on wet and scrunched up fabric until there were no white spots left. I used Yucca green, Forest green, Olive Drab, Emerald green, Sabracon Greeen and Clear yellow.  Random squirting and barely any manipulation works best for me.

Stay tuned for a new photo when the applique is done.

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