June Meeting 2016

Old Business Bandon Retreat is June 20-24th see Amy for details. New Business The Black Sheep Festival is going to be in Eugene on June 26-28 contact Cheryl or Jana for details. Ravelry.com has their Tour de Fleece starting July 4th to coincide with the Tour de France, Jana participates every year, spinning every day while the race is on. The Knotty Lady yarn shop is having a charity for battered persons, bring in a pair of knit socks and get a free skein of yarn. The Medford quilt show is June 24-25, any one interested in going contact Meredith. Show & Tell

Amy ice dyed several silk scarves from Dharma, she will use them for gifts when she goes to the family reunion in Missouri. See the previous post on the ice dye Playday at Amy's click here

One of Cheryl's many beautiful pieces of fabric from the ice dyeing.

Cheryl created the background for this art with blue and white sponged onto black base. Then she put white paint on her leaf and other plant materials and made a print. This is for one of her kids classes at the UV Arts Center this summer.

Bead weaving was used by Vi to make this red, white and blue collar for her birthday on July 4.

This vintage 1930's pink blouse with wool embroidery is one of the items Vi is looking to find a good home for, as she is downsizing her home.

Vi is the Queen of beads, as she hand beaded the butterflies onto her sun printed vest.

Ryan experimented with welding two saws together, to make his plasma cutter tree.

Ryan saw a deer head on Pinterest covered in knitting, so he acquired this tattered old head and plans to cover it with quilted fabric. I am curious to see the outcome on this project. He is looking to acquire an elk head too.

Tracy and Ryan have gotten the very cutest baby Rocket the Papillion, to join their others. He slept through the whole meeting. Meredith has been busy working on her whole cloth project, but does not want to share until she makes further progress on it. Barb has been cleaning in prep for the Sisters Quilt-athon, and she has "quilter's butt" and a sore lower back from the repetitive motion.

Barb finally finished her antelope UFO, that she made from one of her photos. To mark the quilting lines, she drew on Solvy and placed it over the antelope and stitched the lines, and washed away the Solvy. Barb is very involved in the Hart Mountain area every year doing census work on the antelopes.

Peggy has some great results from the ice dyeing playday, her silk scarves shimmer with color, and her fabric is so colorful.

Peggy's t-shirt screams fuchsia!

Jana plans on spinning this "Rose Quartz" merino roving for the Tour de Fleece, sponsored by Ravelry.com

Jana finished her doggie quilt, she spent a lot of time thread painting her precious pets.

Jana loves thread painting so much and crows are a favorite subject, she thread painted this crow for Clare.

Nancy made a fleece dice mat for her bunco group, the sides are padded bumpers to keep the dice from rolling off the table, it must be a wild group to keep throwing the dice away. She also had a display at the lamb show, and found her vintage pleated plaid Pendelton wool skirt she made in high school.

Clare had lots of fun at the ice dyeing, she did several large pieces of fabric.

Clare also dyed two pieces of cotton lace to match her fabrics.

Compare the finished purple spiral fabric that Clare did, with the photo in the previous post when it was wet and coming off the dye process.

Lorraine dyed a set of cotton napkins with the scalloped edges. Her twisted fabric was done with the Indigo dye color, not a traditional indigo dye bath. My notes also say that Lorraine is also doing a red and green study of radishes, we'll have to wait to see what that means. Sue C. has been doing a collage from a pile of scraps, from a friend from Washington's boxes.

Pat G. finished her ragged patchwork sweatshirt. She used a fabric bundle of "Stonehenge" fabric giving it a very coordinated look.

Pat G. has made a large bed quilt for herself, with Civil War reproduction fabrics. Each block is 8" square and has 57 pieces.

Ice Dye Playday

Several of us got together for an ice dyeing play day at Amy's. The weather had been close to 100 all week, but it cooled down for us to a perfect 85. We mixed up two buckets of soda ash, so we could pre-soak our fabrics. Amy had the backyard set up with wire shelving for racks and we all brought different plastic baskets, wire baskets, colanders and stuff to place the fabric in and let the ice drip through. Cheryl brought a large plastic tub, and a refrigerator shelf which she placed on bricks to suspend in the tub. She dyed a several yard piece of fabric all at once.

We wore aprons, rubber gloves and tried to remember the masks when working with the dry dye powder. Several of the ladies had silk scarves to dye, t-shirts and cotton napkins also.

We covered the baskets with plastic to let the ice melt and the dye to batch set. We had a wonderful potluck lunch and just visited and talked about what we were doing. After some time passed, all the ice melted pretty quickly, we took the fabric out of the baskets and put each piece into a Ziplock bag to take home and let set overnight.

Clare seams to like purple. The large piece of fabric she pinched the center of each half and twisted it into opposite directions to create the spiral.

Lorraine twisted her fabric from the corner and used the indigo color Procion MX dye to get the shibori like result.

Sara's multi color silk scarf matches her tie dye t-shirt.

Cheryl's large piece of fabric was the one in the tub. The other fabric was a combo of electric blue and indigo. We had many of the individually named colors of dye powder, instead of working with the 3 primaries and mixing our own blends. We feel this gave us much better results, because we kept getting the same purples and greens every time.

This was made with Chinese red and burgundy, the other with dutch chocolate and terracotta. Other favorite colors were lime squeeze, and hot pink, we also tried better black and jet black, they combined great with the bronze. I can't tell which was more "Black" because we did not use a high enough concentration of dye and we were mixing it with other colors. Amy took her last few pieces of soda ashed fabric and hung it on the clothes line, she dripped liquid dyes on it, left over from our last dye workshop. The fabrics were left over night in the plastic bags, then rinsed until the water ran mostly clear, then washed with Synthrapol in the wash machine and dried and ironed. See the June meeting post to see the results.

May Meeting 2016

Old Business The Bandon Art retreat is June 20-23, contact Amy for details. New Business Need to set up demos for our future meetings, and choose a new theme for next year's challenges. It was suggested we continue with a "wings" type theme as people had unfinished projects, good intentions and more ideas for that theme. A round robin tote bag was discussed, instead of a vest or other wearable art. Look for a favorite pattern we can use. Show & Tell

Vi brought two books on Indigo and Sun Printing for us to look at, she also wore her sun dyed vest again.

Barb is making progress on her moonlit Mardi Gras flowers wall hanging for her friend.

She has used many different techniques to make bright 3-D flowers, some have beads in the center and other details.

Sara brought her beaded Kumihimo bracelets, they are so intricate and feel slinky on your wrists. She will show us how she does it when Corienne does the Kumihimo Japanese braiding demo. Jana has been working on her dog quilt after finishing the thread painted portraits of her two dogs. She has also been doing a lot of spinning.

Lorraine and Pat G. went to the Empty Spools Conference at Asilomar, Lorraine took a class from Pam Holland of Australia in thread painting. She was to bring a photo of a person or pet. She took a pic of her dog. They built up layer and layer of thread, which at first did not look like much, until magically the layers began to look like something. The work was very intense with an open toed sewing foot on her machine.

Pat G. took a class from Lenore Crawford of Michigan. She was to bring an enlarged picture in black and white to work from, and fabric in colors to match the picture. They enlarged the picture on plastic by tracing it, and used up to 5 yards of fusible, as they layered fabric to create their scene.

This is the black and white that Pat made her pattern from. Nancy has been busy sewing a prom dress for a family member. She also told us about the new Roseburg magazine "Verve," free copies are available all over town.

Corienne has made some beautiful shimmery ice dyed raw silk to make a jacket for the big weavers show coming up in Portland. She used black, bronze and blue/green Procion dyes. Pat W. has been very busy with visiting family.

Clare has been busy making felted bead wool necklaces in a rainbow of colors. She is also working on her tapestry loom making the panels of her sunset view that she has been planning.

Clare's felt and wool seascape is compressed into a picture frame with glass. Meredith climbed the 1500 steps of the old town wall on her month long trip to Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro. She is very glad to be home and hopes not to take such a long trip away from home again. She would like us to come down to her place as the weather cools in the fall for a dye workshop.