Saturday, July 14, 2012

Cameras and frustrations

I told my husband that I had arranged to borrow a camera to take some pictures of my shibori work, and this gave him the incentive to actually play with my camera, and see if he could get it working.  He did!  But then acknowledged that it probably won't work again and we need to start looking  for a new one. So here is a picture of the first Shibori piece I finished, and a close-up.  This piece has the basic structural lines machine quilted, but the decorative quilting is done by hand, using hand dyed #16 or #20 DMC embroidery cotton ( not floss--this is the stuff used in very fine white work embroidery.  It's similar to Danish Flower Thread)  This piece is about 26" wide by 37" long.


I've also finished the second Shibori piece, which has been entirely machine quilted, some done freemotion. I put as very narrow border on each side to stabilize the half-square triangles, while I was putting the top together, and now see that I should have balanced that with a similar border on top and bottom.  The final size is 26" by 33".




The last picture is of the fabrics that I have selected--so far--for a potential third piece.  I'm struggling with figuring out how to put these together so that they will work.  The upper left piece is a disaster, and I'm considering over dyeing it, using a flour paste resist, to create a crackle pattern. I think I would use navy rather than black, as it works so well in the piece on the bottom, second from the right. The two pieces on the bottom left came from the same original dyed fabric, but the one second from the left has been overdyed with the fuschia.  This pattern involves a very labour-intensive process, as the tying took me almost a week, of working a couple of hours a day.  I very much like the pattern, but don't think I want to go through that too often!


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