Fabric is Drawn to Me

I had a lovely vacation and family reunion. I won't go into details, as not much happened that had anything to do with quilts or quilting. Yet, as happens, I came home with many yards of fabric that I hadn't had when I left.

Usually, this would mean that the carefree spirit of life on vacation had loosened my pursestrings, and that I'd made the mistake of wandering into a fabric store with no particular project in mind. People who quilt do this with startling predictability, and this is why you will frequently see a) inexplicably thriving quilt shops in most towns that are tourist destinations, and b) many, many quilters, myself included, with the arguably decadent "problem" of figuring out how best to store their mountains of fabric.


But that wasn't the case this time. Instead, I kept running into boxes of free fabric. There was one in the doorway of a church near my parents' place. There was one at a yard sale that I just happened to walk by. And my mom had some scraps on offer, as well. So, even though I was being fairly picky, I still ended up with all of this for the very good price of free.




Then, my sister got a bee in her bonnet to do some tie-dyeing. Now I had never tie-dyed before, despite having attended the University of Oregon, so I did jam down to the local fabric store to get some yardage to experiment with. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with the results, but they are pretty satisfying to the (strong) hippie side of my aesthetic.


I used a white-on-white fabric for that one, which turned out really well. You can see it better in this detail.


Here's a whole spectrum I did on various white-on-whites.


And finally, here's an experiment with blue and yellow dye on a strong black-on-white fabric. I'm not crazy about this specific result -- although it does have a certain Go Ducks! je ne sais quoi to it -- but I think dyeing onto black-on-white has serious potential.


Oh, just to follow up on last week: my color-planning cards were a hit. Niece #1 did not even seem to think I was crazy, and I feel like I have a good sense of her quilt-color aesthetic now. Once she was done, everybody else wanted to be tested too. Hopefully, they understood that taking the test doesn't mean a quilt will automatically be forthcoming. If they didn't, they're going to have a long wait....