A LOVELY LOT

Yes, they are. I have been in a patterning and discharging mode lately, and lots of it. My palette is a rectangle about 12"x18"- a perfect size for me to play around on. After I finish the discharging, I sew it into a small shoulder bag. I've just finished a group of eight, just in time for me to take a welcomed break to Quadra Island's Quilt and Garden Tour this weekend. I'll be sitting in a garden with my "Signs of Life" collection.
Plus, I'll be staying with my friend Barb in Campbell River who is also keen on quilting and a fellow Cyber Fibre member. It should be a fantastic weekend, plus I'll get to see some amazing gardens.

Back to the purses. Here are some leafy ones.

Here are some lacy ones. I think they are my favorites.

Here are geometric patterns,

And here are some hand painted salmon on these two bags.

Now I am off to Quadra...by myself!

ANOTHER SALMON SEASON

Here in Refuge Cove the salmon are running. Tom had a two week spurt of successful salmon outings that netted more than a dozen beauties. It must have inspired me to turn some hand-painted remnants that I discovered in one of my fabric boxes (that I'm trying so hard to clear out) and turn them into small useable items (small shoulder bags). 

                                                   

Salmon invite other like-minded fabrics to join in on their collaborative fun...anything gray, scaley, watery, coral or blue in color, swirly and net-like. The pairings are intriguing. The outcomes satisfying.

 Hopefully the season, both on water and in the studio, is just beginning.

PATTERNS TO DISCHARGE

Lately I've been having lots of fun with pattern work (sketching and stitching) and discharging. Here is a pattern I put to paper and then later to cloth.

In this case I used Soft Scrub with bleach as my discharge agent, which takes out more color than Decolorant or Discharge Paste...so I was left with bright white circles that just invited colorful buttons.
I will soon turn this into a small shoulder bag...maybe this one will be a fun bag to hold my camera!
I've been making lots of bags lately and doing similar pattern stitching and discharging on them. Here are some examples of the process I go through.

I love to piece together different colors and visual textures to add interest to the finished product. After piecing, I stitched two different patterns I put into these pieced rectangles, one of flowers and the other of leaves.

Now it was time to discharge. On the leaf pieces I used Decolorant. On the flower pieces I used Soft Scrub with bleach, plus I wanted to try something different so I discharged a "positive" set of flowers and other I a "negative" set of flowers. Here are what they looked like after the discharging, but before I washed the out the reactive agents. Might I add that this was more discharging than I typically like to do, but curiosity got the best of me.

There was too much "bright" in the flower pieces so I tried to tone it down with one of my favorite dyeing tools - cheesecloth. I dipped my cheesecloth into straight dye (a very dark purple in this case), wrung it out and stretched it over my work surface. I then placed my soda ashed flower piece over the cheesecloth and proceeded to roll over it with a dowel to hopefully take on the delicate grid-like pattern of the cheesecloth.

I had never done this with a quilted piece before and I'm not sure I would try it again, as it left a few blobs. Maybe it was because of the fact that it was a thick, already quilted piece, or maybe because of the pressure of the dowel. OR maybe the piece should have been damp with soda ash instead of dry. Regardless, I am going to stick with just using soda-ashed cotton for this work like I have in the past. Here are the finished results.