Play date

Kathie and I had another mental health day today.  :-)  We ended up at my house again since my car was in the shop (sigh).  Our play time consisted of experimenting with sun dying.  We used the instructions in Karen Eckmeier's article, "Sun Prints With Tissue Paper," from Quilting Arts Magazine, Summer 2006. 

We tore up a rainbow of art tissue, wet our fabric, cut up some plastic bags to work on, put on our old clothes, mixed our paint colors, and got busy "painting" our fabrics with "sun" paints. Then we lay torn strips and chunks of tissue paper over the wet paint and lay it all out in the sun to dry.  Dying fabrics is not something I do, so this was a fun new experience.

The hot Carolina sun dried things up pretty quickly.  This one still has the tissue paper on it.

And after I peeled the paper off!

You can almost see landscapes in them already!

Then we played with putting shapes, in this case leaves, on the fabric before we placed it in the sun.  A sun resist?  I saw a similar thing on How About Orange, though she used light sensitive dye.  So we didn't have a clue if it would work.

As Kathie would say, "Cool beans!"

After lunch we got onto our other project.  We are making up a set of Holiday Block kits for our quilt guild.  We have permission to use Bonnie Hunter's Happy Scrappy Houses pattern.  And made a good start cutting the strips and squares for the kits.  Two blocks in each of 21 kits that will be sold for a nominal fee at the next guild meeting along with a whole bunch of different kits (we hope!).  There is a small budget for fabric (as yet unspent) but most of this is from my stash.  Can you tell I lean towards brights?  Last time Kathie and I did this, two or three years ago, I won our set of Holiday Blocks at the December meeting!  Yikes.  Another UFO!  I think I better dig those out and make a quilt from them. 

This is the "dog bed corner" of our bedroom.  Nothing much bothers Maisy as long as there are cushy beds scattered around the house for her to lie on.  Talk about the lap of luxury.  :-)  The other two get hot and like to lay on the tile floors in the kitchen and bathrooms.  Not our crazy Maisy!