Category Archives: Printing

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You would not believe it.  I actually dyed some fabric!

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Thank you to those who commented and emailed me regarding the death of my friend.

I thought I would share another photo of the aftermath of the Moondarah Bush Fire with you. You can make out the burnt hill through the trees. This photo was taken facing south east towards Yallourn North (I think) most of the affect area was behind us.

A shot of hills burnt during the recent fire in Moondarah State Forest.

This weekend Riscy upgraded my computer to make it faster. We are a household of many PCs and we are in a constant state of upgrading and swapping bits between computers…. when I say ‘we’, I mean Riscy.

The fact is that I wouldn’t even have a computer if we didn’t live together. I am grateful though, because I can now hang out with people who share the same passions as myself, and more importantly, the internet has given me access to those who constantly provide me with inspiration and know-how to create things I would never have dreamt of otherwise.

I dyed about 10m of fabric tonight. Hopefully some of the pieces will be good enough for the Dredger Quilt. I am itching to get everything cut out and fused so I can start quilting. I may delay if I think the background piece needs some printed texture. All will be revealed after the rinse tommorow. Continue reading →

What to do with 250g (8.8oz) merino/silk blend top. Dye it orange of course!

This was a very expensive purchase, it was a toss up between spinning it white or dyeing prior to spinning. I chose to dye first. Mmmm now I have a whole heap of orange 🙂 I’m now wondering how I should spin this up, thick or thin… Is this enough to knit a jumper (sweater) with? (I’ve never knitted one, so I don’t know). It would probably spin up really nice as laceweight, but I’d probably get 3 shawls out of it… how many orange shawls do I need?

On other news, I started a major spinning project today with the silky wool I got at the Bendigo wool show. The wool is treated to make it feel and look silky. It behaves a bit like silk too. I’m spinning it VERY thin, like thread. I don’t have a lace flier so I’m really concentrating on getting adequate twist in my single, I want to 2ply this, but if the twist is inadequate I might have to 3 ply.

I’ve done heaps of work this weekend too. My stresses of a few days ago are dissipating (YAY!!!) A few more hours tonight should set me up well for the coming week. Riscy is using my occupation with work as an excuse to play some stupid computer game ALL day, EVERYDAY. I hate it, such a f#cking useless waste of time. I waste time too, reading romance novels etc but holy crap, the TIME this sucks out of his life. I need to let go of my inner control freak 🙂

Update on Kiri… I realised today that I’ll need to do 12 repeats of the middle chart.. not 10 as I had thought. So I still have a way to go. I spent an hour knitting in the beautiful sunshine this afternoon. Spring is here!!

My sympathy to those in hurricane affected areas of the US. The reports we are getting here are appalling. I can’t believe people are still trapped in buildings. I can’t watch TV (again), things affect me too much. I just hope changes are made to procedures for dealing with these situations in future.

*** Rant Deleted ***

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Unlike the turd below 🙁

And onto the apology. I really want to make art quilts, I want to lock myself into my sewing room and CREATE. But this wool is calling me, the knitting wont let me go. I’m starting to get worried that the urge to quilt has left me for good :-(. Should I resign from the Artful Quilters Webring until the muse returns?

And to make matters worse, I have this bloody King Sized wedding quilt to finish… I hate hate hate it. So boring (blue and white Jacobs ladder, blah) and I’m worried that the blue fabric will run into the white fabric in the first wash and all that work will be wasted. I’m such a whiner, I should get over myself. (Monica, if you read this, take it with a grain of salt) Continue reading →

First let me start by saying that Muslin has a different meaning in Australia than it does in the US, and some other cloths and sewing things have different names too:

Aust. = US
Muslin = ? (Gauze?)
Calico = Muslin
Homespun = Broadcloth? (economical, plain evenweave fabric I dye and use in all my quilts)
Wadding = Batting

Having never been to the US and not knowing any americans or canadians personally, I could have these wrong… I’ve picked it up from learning quilting from the internet 🙂

Here is some muslin I dyed on the weekend. Its so light and airy and crinkly and soft and bright… I love Muslin.

I bought 2 metres of this fabric a few weekends ago when I had a bee in my bonnet to try nuno felting. I’ve lost interest a bit in the nuno felting now, I want to use the soft, light properties of the muslin as it is. It’ll have to wait ’til I get back from Fiji though ;-).

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