Trip Around the World Christmas Cards

It's December and it's that time of year when I put a morning aside and make Christmas cards.


These are actually what I made last year but I made them so late that there wasn't much time left to share the idea.

Hope there's time for you to try them this year.

First of all cut lots of 1'' x 1'' squares of Christmas fabrics with your rotary cutter and ruler. Cut as many as you can.

Now start laying them out in rows on your ironing board.

 Make sure you place them right side down.

Make the rows as long as your ironing board.

And then keep adding rows. Make sure there are no gaps between the squares. Spend time trying to get the rows as perfect as you can.

Cut some bondaweb/fusible web the same height as your cards are going to be. Now carefully iron the strips of bondaweb onto the fabric squares, trying very hard not to displace them.

It's very cool when you can lift them all up once they're attached.

Now carefully trim the top and the bottom. 

Once this is done you can cut various widths to fit your cards.

If you look carefully at my selection of cards you can see how I cut differing widths. Sometimes a small, narrow piece is more effective than covering the whole surface.

And you can also make bookmarks.

 

Here I've used Christmas fabrics but you can use any fabrics you like and make any cards you want with whatever patchwork block design you like. Cards for all times of the year and for every occasion.

Happy ironing.

End of the Summer

Well it's Monday, September 16 and here in Andalucía everybody is back to school.

September for me always feels like the beginning of the year so before I embark on more projects for the autumn and winter here's a photo review of the summer.

I actually had two free months this year and having moved down here to the coast there were a lot of new inspirations. July I did loads of work but I think that the heat was getting to me by August and I wasn't half as productive.

Well I'm living by the sea and at the end of the beach there are piles of nets with wonderful lines and a palette of colours which I wanted to use for dyeing. Project for the future?

Later on in the summer I photographed beach towels hanging from a hotel's balconies at the end of a day. This project I did mange to use.

One photo which I didn't get was the lines, and double lines, of colourful parasols all the way along the beach. Next year.

Of course there were new paving tiles

and another antique quilt which sent me off into a whole new series of work.

As I've already written, I spent alot of time dyeing.Here's my 'Dye Studio'.

A few things side tracked me:

Sun dyeing - with procion! Fun but didn't lead anywhere.

Natural dyeing. No idea where this is leading.

I have a saucepan of pomegranates stewing at the moment and mordants coming in the post.

In the grips of the first wave of enthusiasm - I had sewn the first indigo seeds- I found these amazing and HUGE saucepans in the weekly flea market. Of course I had to buy them - they were a bargain!!!!

The end of the summer saw a whole new range of fruit come into the market: figs, dragon fruit, passion fruit and the very first mangoes. I love the way they are arranged in rows on the market stalls. I've got lots of photos and they're ready for a big, winter project.

These two are nothing to do with textiles or needles and thread but they did take over quite a bit of time. Perhaps this is why I got very little done in August? Finally our budgies mange to hatch their eggs, luckily only two of the six hatched. Suddenly one night when the chicks were about three weeeks old their mum decided to pull out their feathers and so suddenly we were hand rearing chicks. It took three of us to do it at the beginning but slowly, us and the chicks, worked out what we were supposed to do. They are now beginning to fly around and almost feeding themselves at last!!!

And finally THE STORM which landed on us one afternoon at the beginning of September.

Dramatic and swift and despite being up on the terraza taking photos of the clouds I forgot to bring in my pots of indigo seedlings. By the time I realised that they were out there I would have had to wade across to rescue them, and there was a lot of lightning and hail stones, well more like small chunks of ice. Needless to say the seedlings didn't do very well. They're still alive, just, but with burnt leaves. One little plant was under the table and is still nice and green and I'm hoping come the spring this will be the one which flowers and gives me seeds for the next attempt.

I'm now looking forward to it all being a bit cooler. One of my other projects was quilting my Pink Trip Around the World, not the best idea sitting underneath a wool filled quilt in the middle of August on the South coast of Spain. Just have to get all the quilting done before next summer!!

Back to Dyeing

Last week I was hand dyeing. I've been dyeing fabric for years and probably all of my quilts have my own fabric in them somewhere. Some of my quilts are all hand dyes.

Birds of Paradise, 2005

The Trip Around the World series had lots of rounds of hand dyed squares. The occasional gaps in the colour made me think of them as little bits of sunshine coming through the clouds. They were an intrinsic part in making all of these quilts alive and interesting.

I began dyeing with Procion MX dyes many years ago. I was then living in Ireland and this meant ordering them from the UK. Then Dylon came along with their Pure Colour range. They were a godsend: procion based dyes which I could buy in Cork one jar at a time as they ran out. Perfect until the product was discontinued.

I've kept going since then on my leftovers and everybody else's but finally the fix ran out. So I took a deep breath, didn't look at the total, and ordered a whole new batch of dyes and soda ash from Kemtex.( www.kemtex.co.uk an excellent and really helpful company)

I have hundreds of dyeing notes but it's taken me all week to get back into soda ash and urea solutions. I'm hoping all my colour recipes will be the same, and if they aren't well I'll just have a new range of colours.

I spent the initial years merrily squirting syringes of dye into layers of fabrics in jars but eventually I think you feel the need to be more scientific/professional/organised(?). So now I have colour charts and can reproduce colours or dye exactly the shade or tone which I need. Purples, oranges and browns are my favourites. Blues are still a disaster and that beautiful, clear, bright red remains illusive.

I've learnt to re-dye. Think of painting a wall, the first coat of paint dries a bit wishy-washy but the second one is much deeper. It's the same with dyeing; dye a second time and you'll be thrilled with the results.

Fabrics dyed once, on the right, and fabrics dyed twice, on the left.

Also in the box is a jar of synthetic indigo. Indigo – even the name is evocative. I've been dying to try it for years. I have an idea, possibly irrational, that living in a hot climate should produce better results. I haven't opened the jar yet as I'm a bit afraid of letting the genie out of the bottle, I don't think I'll ever stop once I start, but I have done lots of research on the internet. This all led me to thinking about dyeing with natural indigo. One web page led to another and my first seedlings of Japanese Indigo and Woad have just come up. But that's a subject for another post.

The first tiny seeds.