Grim outside, cozy inside

If yesterday's dog walk was bleak, today's was grim. It resulted in  a complete change of clothes on my return home as I was utterly soaked. The wind raged against me and the snow hit me straight on. It has been wild here at Macbiehill and in fact still is. We briefly lost our electricity last night. It's back now but I'm doing this blog post and my blip now (10.00 am) just in case! And on a personal note , good luck to my mother. Hope all goes well!

While it's freezing outside inside it's all calm and tranquil. I did finish the appliqué phase of my latest quilt and you are getting a minuscule glimpse of it above. Just the colours make me feel warmer. All the fabrics were hand dyed by me a few weeks ago, with some dating back about 10 years also included. And the little squares (inchies) are parts from a wide variety of fabric paper collages.

A Day of Stitching

Remember the velvet I dyed last week? It has now been incorporated into a quilt top together with some of the other cottons I dyed at the same time and is in the process of being stitched. That's just about all I did today. Love such stitching sessions. This is only a minute detail as I'm keeping this one to myself for the time being.

 

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Going Wild with Dyeing

It has literally been years since I last dyed any fabric. I know exactly how long because I did a whole lot of it during the first summer we lived here in 1996. Dyeing was one of my favourite things to do but while I was playing away. John mentioned the fact that we now had a septic tank (I had to ask him what it was! what a townie!) with an overflow in the field. And when I had a look I could see that coloured rinse water flowing merrily down into a nearby stream. Not good! And of course the dye also kills off the bacteria that keep the septic tank functioning. So no more dyeing was done and instead I bought fabric dyed by other people. But yesterday I had the chance to dye in a friend's home that is connected to the mains drainage system and oh what fun we had.

We dyed mainly cotton but I had one piece of what we both now think is a velvet silk cotton mix or maybe viscose. What ever it is it has a marvellous sheen to it and I'm sharing the pictures of the finished piece here.

Yes, this is just one piece of cloth and as you can tell I went wild with the colours using most all of them on this one item. And the results far exceeded my expectations. A lots of ohhhhhhhhhhhs and ahhhhhhhhhhs happened when we took it out of the dye bath and started rinsing it. I have an idea of what I'm going to do with it but it will be quite some time before I can make myself put the scissors into it!

 For the moment it just makes me so happy looking at it and discovering all the amazing details.