Shibori unwrapped

Images are starting to trickle in from our silk shibori class a couple of weeks ago, here are just a few of the gorgeous results. Mine is the pastel color palette

 Carolyn's beautiful teal overdyed with purples and fuchsia!

 My pastel hues...maybe I was inspired by shells I collected on our recent beach getaway?

 Rosie's gorgeous rainbow of colors, love these!

a change for me, but these days I am leaning toward softer, more romantic tones as I'm doing more with neutrals for my fall "prairie" line for Houston Quilt Market. (Ok, there will be some color natch, I love happy colors!) Some of us (me!) used wool yarn to wrap our silk with , so we got a two-fer: dyed silk and wool yarn for embellishing to match. I love all the beautiful, rich colors the girls used to overdye with, can't wait to see the works of art they create with these in our next meeting!

Fantastic fascinator entries!

Drum roll please...we have 2 new fascinator entries for our 25-year Anniversary Contest! These are so adorable, I just love Wendy's "celebration of Autumn" hat she made after taking my Fascinator class at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival 2014. As a teacher, there is nothing so rewarding than to be able to inspire my students to go a step further and try new things, put their personal touch on what they have learned in class. And Wendy has definitely done that here! And the green spring hat...my fave colors, and the color combination is spot on. Well done Wendy, and good luck with the contest going on in 2015 - a lucky winner will win 25 items from our company at the end of the year!

Lattice Scarf goodies

I found some great yarns for our felted Lattice Scarf class this past weekend! My favorite find was the silk/merino lavender yarn with built-in beaded bling, I can't wait to try this one! It has a beautiful luster to it from the silk, and the wool will help it felt into the fibers. It's going to be stunning felted into that lavender blue fiber colorway, but really, wouldn't it be pretty on the green too? I love green and purple together. I also found that gorgeous green wool fiber and think that will enhance several colorways, green goes with so many things! And I have a ton of autumn colors, perfect timing for this artsy scarf.

Looking forward to teaching this fun scarf in Charlotte September 19 and in Houston at the October Quilt Festival - no rolling!

Silk shibori workshop

We had such a good time in our silk shibori class today! I pre-dyed some yummy silk charmeuse in colors that I thought the girls would like: a nice green, teal, bronzy gold, ivory, a bit of red for those adventurous, and left a few white. This will be the base color for their pieces. Then I did a sampler of dye colors they could use for accent to paint over their silk once it was pole-wrapped. I also brought wool yarn for them to wrap with, that will take the dye too and then can be used for embellishment. Anxious to see how they all turned out, but we must be patient and let them dry first. Here's some pics of the girls hard at work.

These are the colors we started with, of course you can't really go wrong with silk! And the sample strip shows color choices they used for overdyeing.