New direction

I spent sometime yesterday reading "The Painted Quilt" by Laura and Linda Kemshell. Many wonderful quilts and many wonderful ideas. This was a borrowed book, and my friend Linda, will be ordering a couple for us later in the month. I was looking to see if anything caught me eye for something to try first. I was intrigued with the idea of altering the surface of a quilt after the quilting is actually done. I spent part of yesterday watching another friend play with discharge paste, so that's in my mind. So, I think I want to try doing some machine quilting and then discharging the colour after the quilting is finished. The other thing that was brought home to me, in the book, was the idea of discharging dark colours other than black. In particular they mentioned dark grey. Since I have at least 1 1/2m of dark grey/black fabric from when I did the gradation dyeing, I'm thinking of using that. I know that Procion dyes were used for the original colour there. I also have at least two big pieces of charcoal grey commercial fabric that I can discharge and compare to the hand-dyed pieces. I'll limit myself to making samples,at first, and keep a record of what happens. This will take awhile, but it's not as though I have anything else to do over the winter.

However, this week is my trip to BC for the FAN retreat. I'm very much looking forward to that. While I'm away, DH will be down at the lake fixing the plumbing--hopefully before freeze up.

Yesterday, I had hoped to update my section on the http://www.manitobaart.com/ website. We spent quite a bit of time working on it, but when I checked later last evening, it seems that we forgot to hit the "save changes" button. So I guess I'll be spending some time today re-writing that to send off to the webmaster.

Grandbabies are coming for supper. We have everything planned, and are very much looking forward to it. They just have so very much energy, and we're both exhausted by the time they leave.