Lisa Call

I spent the weekend dyeing fabric with my very talented friend Julie, the head designer at Icelandic Design. I enjoyed seeing her amazing beaded jewelry and quilts.

I love dyeing - what a big goopy mess and what wonderful colors. I dyed 90 yards of fabric in a day and a half.

Rayna ask in her blog about our least favorite art, studio, business related thing. I couldn’t come up with anything to post because I do enjoy all of it.

Until this weekend - I do the dyeing in my basement but have to carry all the bins of fabric and dye upstairs to my washer. Ugh - it is heavy - and I spill it on the carpet and it’s overall a very unpleasant task. I’d love to get a second washer/dryer in the basement dedicated to dyeing so I could this task.

I dye in 1 yard pieces - Kaufman pimatex PFD. The blacks are overdyed black pimatex. I dye them with blue, green, purple, fushia, red, etc to have a variety of blacks to work with. Occasionally I will dye white fabric to black because I love the texture but it’s a trick to get the black to really work - takes a bunch of dye and salt. So it is easier to just over dye black.

I was aiming for mostly warm colors, hence the lack of blues and purples. Although my favorite fabric is a very dusty gray purple. Yummy.

I mentioned in my previous post that my day job takes up way too much of my time. Thought I’d post a picture of where I spend 40 hours a week as a software engineer.

Can you identify the cube belonging to the artist? There is just too much gray at Oracle….

Pam asked:

Why do you do so many quilt tops and wait to quilt them later? I usually do a top and quilt it right away, but do you feel like you get more done this way?

I feel that design and construction of a quilt top requires a different set of skills than are needed to quilt them. I feel I work better if I stick with a single type of task for an extended period of time because I become more efficient the more I repeat a skill. There are things I learn that I want to remember, kind of like little “tricks”, as I do each process. I want to retain that information in my head from piece to piece.

For example, when I was piecing Structures #47, slowly some thoughts I had about how I had pieced a similar quilt last year came back to me. Unfortunately I first made the same mistakes over again before I remembered what I had learned, like cutting some lines too thin, or not getting angles the way I thought might look best. If I do several quilt tops in a row the information I have learned builds up and I make fewer mistakes, the result being, I think, that the work improves.

I suppose it is like muscle memory - we repeat the same motions over and over again and we get much more efficient but also skilled at doing them.

The second part of my answer is that I like the designing and construction more than I like the quilting. It’s not that I don’t like the quilting - I love it - I find it very meditative. But the piecing is what really energizes me.

I’m currently making a concerted effort to get many of the quilt tops pieced. I’ve completed 2 1/2 of them in since August 1. I very heavily stitch my quilts as I love the texture. So it is a very slow process - taking from 20-50 hours depending on the size of the quilt. I always think I should find a faster way of doing the quilting but I’m never happy with the results. I had hoped to get 4 quilts done a month but it looks like it will be closer to 3. The day job really cuts into my quilting time - but that is a topic for another day.

I’ll post some close up shots of the quilting later this weekend.

I completed sewing together Structures #47 over the weekend.

The colors aren’t accurate in the photos I’ve posted of this piece because there is black felt behind the light colors, so they are a bit distorted. It will look different after the quilt is completed.

Here’s a view of the entire top:

Someone asked me how I handled this disparate block sizes when piecing. This is what I find interesting and fun in this type of work. Fitting all of the odd shapes together and retaining a quality composition.

To do this I have to add extra strips in places where the blocks were too small, or cut down a block that was too large. I do all straight line seaming (although this piece does have 1 set in corner). Sometimes I have to sew only part of a seam and finish it later when the adjacent areas are ready to be attached.

It’s a slow process but it’s enjoyable and the result is worth it as I think the quilt has more movement and interest with varying blocks sizes compared to an easy to piece simple grid.

This is a detail shot of the upper left hand corner. You can see the extra strips I’ve added to some of the blocks.