Counteracting a blah day

Raise a toast to bloggers!

I love blogging and I am happy to see the progress of my online buddies via their blogs as well. I am also happy to celebrate the 333rd blog post of one of my friends Wil Opio Oguta , who is giving away one of her beautiful snow dyed fabrics to some lucky winner if you post a comment on her blog. Hope I win!

I finally cut into some of the lovely fabric I dyed last week.. we didn't bleed! Sometimes it is hard to make that first cut... the fabric is so luscious looking that I just want to pet it . Yep, I am probably nuts, but I know I am in good company.

My Darth Vader respirator arrived yesterday so next week I am going to attack (discharge) the piece of ugly freeze dyed fabric.. it has a cousin that has been sitting in my closet for 8 months. Watch out! I am going to beat them into shape.

Overcast and chilly here but it beats snow.

I will have a yard of fabric in "To the Studio" sponsored by Peggy Schroder. Check all the totes  out at http://www.virginiaspiegel.com/ToteTuesdayLast.html 

All proceeds go directly to the American Cancer Society.

Freeze dyed gets....

... 2 thumbs down. The idea of dyeing frozen soda ashed fabric intrigued me so I decided to give it a try. I placed my frozen fabric on netting over a container so it didn't sit in the liquid. I squirted dye all over it and let in sit in the cold garage for 20 hours then brought in back in the house for about 5 more hours. When I started to rinse out the dye, I noticed that there was a whole area where the dye never penetrated. This is butt ugly. My dye rags come out better looking! I have a bunch of choices here... I can try to discharge the right side and do some deconstructed screening on the left, or I can cut it in half and use the left side for a dye rag and just cut up the other side as needed. I think I am leaning towards that. I really do not need another piece of fabric that needs so much work to be salvaged. ... or I could give it away to someone who thinks they can fix it up.

Things did get better. I rarely use premixed dyes but I fell in love with Grape so I have been using it. It does some really lovely things. I had just a bit left from the crossover dyeing and wanted to use it up so I added it to some yellow hoping for a nice brown. When it was batching I wasn't real happy with it and still wasn't thrilled when I was ironing it, but when I hung it up on my design wall I had all sorts of ideas pop into my head. This reminds me of the cave paintings at Lascaux. I am happy with this piece. I even wrote down the measurements and might be able to duplicate it.

It is yet another rainy, gloomy, chilly day here... it's getting depressing. Maybe I will go back to my hand stitching. Got the sleeve on a piece yesterday and need to make a label for an upcoming show.

I was recently invited to join a great new group.. the Textile and Fiber Art list. The members come from a very varied background. It is run by Rachel Biel. Please check it out .. Her other group is Fiber Focus and that looks like fun as well.

Hopefully, I will get to the piece of fabric I froze and try out some dyeing, since thankfully we have no snow.

Hope you all have a great weekend.

Quilting Blogs

I found this neat site called Quilterblogs. It lists over 800 quilting blogs and other neat stuff. They post interesting blogs daily so if you join you can get a much wider audience. Quilterblogs.com
That sounds pretty cool to me.

New web presence

I have been trying to get a web site up for months.... used all sorts of tricks to procrastinate and find other things to do, but this morning I bit the bullet and cheated.... I used a template from iweb and it went together fairly easily. With the feedback from my online buddies I made changes so that it was not too over the top. It still needs a bit of work but it is UP and running! URL is http://www.sherrylbuchler.com
Comments for improvement are always welcome. I will get a links page up and would be most happy to exchange links.
And on another happy note.... most of my fabrics are gone. I have yet to get the rest of them up on the other blog. Other things have taken precedent. I am going to have to do some more crossover dyeing though.

Mellow Yellow?

... not for me. These are the last of the dyed fabrics.  I am just not a yellow person but I realized that I had no yellow in my stash so I did a fat quarter gradation. Most of these will probably languish in my stash pile. Two of these fabrics came off the bolt with imperfections so I cannot unload the set, pity.

I will do more dyeing later in the week. I think I am going to go back to crossovers. I really love the way they came out, AND I have gotten requests for them before I have gotten them up on my other blog. That will happen later... for whats left.

Move over Snow dyers!

I didn't have snow and I didn't freeze my fabric but I did get similar results from my efforts at multi color dyeing. I wanted some deeper colors so used full concentrations for most of the pieces. I did try for some lighter values as well but will do more of those another day. I finally got these washed out and ironed. Enjoy.

More fabric

I did some black/gray gradations. I like the darker values but the lighter ones have too much mottling for me. I have yellows in the wash and a bunch of multi colors washing as well.  Enjoy.

Snow envy

I need to preface this post by saying that I do not really miss the snow. That said, I AM envious of being able to play with the snow and do some snow dyeing. It sure looks like fun. I might try some in my freezer. Reading all about the fun everyone was having motivated me into doing some of my own dyeing. I did some crossover colors and have more waiting in the wings. I have a black/grey gradation about to go in the washer. I will post photos as I get more done but this is a busy weekend for me so probably not much more till Tuesday. In the meantime, here are some photos of what I have done. I love these. I just have to decide which I will keep and which I will sell.

Playing the UFO game

I decided to participate in Quilting Arts fix the UFO game. This is my first ever attempt at an art quilt. It has been languishing in the closet for some very obvious reasons. It is pretty bad. If one of their geniuses can make a silk purse out of this sows ear, I will be very surprised... shocked would be closer to the truth.

The sun is shining and I am in a good mood. My DH will be home on Thursday.

Flowers in your face

I have been plugging away at this piece... has no name yet. I got all the flowers machine stitched on and have been doing lots of hand stitching. French knots get old really fast. Trying to figure out exactly what I am going to do with this when it is done. I am hoping to have it ready for quilting next week. I don't even want to think about that yet!
The rains from California arrived here in Arizona over night. We had torrential downpours most of the night along with thunder and lightening.... pretty weird for this time of year. After overcast skies this morning the sun broke through and it was lovely.... then I heard this weird noise and looked out the window to see hail.... with the sun shining! Did not last long and no damage. We need the rain desperately but I wish it would come in small doses instead of flood stage all at once. I think we get more later in the week. At least we are not shoveling snow.

My daughter adopted the cutest kitten... 9 weeks old. She says it has been growing in the past week. I think she wasn't being fed enough. Turns out the kitty is picky about food, so as of today she has a bunch of new stuff to try. My daughter doesn't know that cats train us... not the other way around! Welcome to my world where Sammy runs this house.

Sneak Peak

I am finally feeling human after being laid low the past week by a bad head cold. I can only hope I licked this one and it won't develop into something worse.
I have been trying to work on a piece I started at the end of the summer but got put on hold. I have been making some progress and yesterday and today feel like I am heading in the right direction with it. Here is a sneak peak. I am doing both hand and machine work on this.
I am really trying to focus more and find that a schedule works best for me.  There have been some discussions of late on other blogs about finding time to work on art. For me, if I don't have a block of time penciled in I find a zillion excuses for doing other things. I find that a set routing every morning really helps. After I get up, I peruse the days news and my email, check on my Google reader for the blogs that I follow which have been updated, check into Facebook and see what is new there and now have added Twitter to this routine. By now I am awake enough to eat some breakfast. I cannot drink coffee (caffeine does not like me) so I don't get that jolt in the morning. Now I am ready to face my studio and what ever I have on tap at the moment. I try for a minimum of 1 hour a day. Thankfully, when I get in the groove that can easily stretch into many many more hours. Some days it means I may be just doing some clean up... I tend to work in a chaotic state and my space looks like the latest tornado blew through. I get easily distracted by the latest and greatest techniques or books I want to read. Focusing on finishing things rather than just starting them is my goal for this year.

21st Century

I have officially entered the 21st century... I opened a twitter account! Why?? That is a good question and I hope it doesn't wind up biting me in the ass. The reason: On a lark a few months ago I responded to a call for entries into Curate This! 2010. I entered one of my still life pieces and this morning I got a notification that it was accepted into one of the venues... I do not know which one yet. After a moment of euphoria I read the rest of the email and it was suggested that entrants have twitter accounts. So after taking a deep breath and asking for some advice, I took the plunge. I feel like a fish out of water here but I guess I will learn the ropes as I go. Not sure what I am going to tweet as I cannot imagine that anyone is interested in my going to the grocery store or going to play bridge or any of the usual mundane activities that fill my day. If you are really hard up for entertainment, my twitter address is http://twitter.com/sherrylbuchler. I suppose I will add this to the sidebar on the blog.. maybe later.