In The Works

This is the new piece I'm working on ~ I got the top pieced today and need to dye the backing fabric tomorrow or Friday.

Three of the fabrics here were handwoven -- the green one with orange verticals on the left, the orange with small green dots on the right, and the two pieces at top and bottom with the large orange circles. All of these pieces were samples I wove when I first began with woven shibori. They were woven white with black shibori threads, then were dyed using natural dyes. The particular dyestuffs that the instructor had us use were not especially lightfast, and over two to three years the color drained out of them. Recently I shiboried them in the same bath with fiber reactive dyes, and essentially built this quilt around those three pieces.

The rest of the fabrics were shiboried in one way or another, except the brownish gray and orange pieces with the biggest circles -- those are bits of a larger piece that was rusted, then batiked, then overdyed with tannin. I had imagined using much of that piece of fabric for this quilt...but things often don't work out how we initially plan them, do they?

I finished my weekly quilt today and will post that tomorrow. I'm back into Eureka tomorrow, for the third time this week, to have my hair cut. So I'll miss much of another day in the studio. I'm planning to make up for it this weekend!