out of the dye pot

They all came out of the same bucket. Thank you to Terri Stegmiller for her fabulous tutorial. I'm so very happy that I can dye fabric again. Up until now I felt that my left arm and hand were too (stroke-)weak to do a good dye job. And I still feel too clumsy to do it my usual way, which involves ziploc baggies. But I felt brave enough to face my dye powders with one of Terri's methods.

first snow this winter

checking in

It seems that I'm not only extremely introverted and shy IRL (even more so after the stroke), but that it transcends to my online life too.

I have been quilting over the last two months. I'm no longer interested in commercially printed fabric, so I used up the stash that I accumulated in the '90s. Since I'm in Europe and buying fabric here is quite expensive (I imported my stash from the USA, since it used to be less expensive than buying fabric from the few local quilt shops), and I used to quilt a lot earlier in my life, the stash I had left wasn't too big anymore. I managed to strip piece/cut/strip piece/cut/etc. nine quilts (I pieced front and back) in the style of the one in the photo below. I didn't even bother to take photos of them all (and four were already given as gifts). All that I have left now is a small stash of batiks, which I'll probably mix in with my hand dyed fabric until it's used up. And then it will be hand dyed fabric only, plus maybe some solids thrown in, or recycled clothing. For now at least.

The second picture is a table runner that "happened" during the strip piecing process. Back in the '80s I hand quilted *1* quilt, everthing else I've done since then was machine quilted. This is the first piece I hand quilted again. Since I'm doing it for my own pleasure and gifts only, I hand quilt without a care in the world. No tiny or evenly sized stitches here, and I still love the resulting look. The Quilt Police can bite me!