Big Messy Pile In My Garage

Remember when the fabric we dyed with indigo told me it wanted to be a quilt?

I didn't listen right away.  First I made some napkins.

 

Then, for some reason to do with people visiting and using my car and me being disorganized, it all ended up in a big messy pile in my garage. That's right, the garage. 

But now it's all alright because I spent my afternoon sewing it into quilt squares.  

Have I ever mentioned - over and over again - that I loooooooove improvising a quilt together.  Love it.  I can't imagine that following a pattern is even half this much fun.

I also love linen and have taken a ridiculous number of close up

and far away

 and close up pictures.

I made seven squares today.

I'll probably make nine all together,  Maybe twelve, I don't know.

I think this is my favorite.  

So here's another picture of it.

This one I'm going to just keep in one piece.

I haven't sewn for a while and it was so fun to do.  

I remember once telling a friend of mine that I had figured out how to make quilting go really fast.  Then I realized that I didn't actually speed up the process, I was just enjoying myself so much that time was flying.  

I Stained The Driveway

We ended up with mixed results from our rust dyeing.  

Jennifer had two big pieces of canvas.  This one ended up looking really cool.  

One day soon, it will be an apron.

The other one should have been really amazing, she placed in on coils of wire.  But they didn't rust, we figure they must have been coated.  

This part sat on the outdoor fireplace grill - a very popular piece.

But this one is fabulous and we learned to test metal first.  If you get it wet and leave it out, you'll be able to tell if it will rust or not before you play with it.  

I love this, it's from the grill of the smallest hibachi I've ever seen.  Smaller than the one in the link.

This one was wire wrapped around rebar.  It's my favorite of the stuff I made.  

The lines are from the wire.  

I think it was floral wire - not sure though.  That's what happens when you buy your supplies at thrift shops and yard sales.  :)

This is from where the rebar touched the fabric.  I like this part, too.  We're going to find some larger tubes to wrap fabric around so that more of the fabric gets color.  We're thinking wine bottles or large pvc tubes.   Stay tuned.

Here's a sweet little piece that I put on some rail road ties and steel scrubbies. 

 I don't know how I feel about it, it's a bit too something something for me.  Geometric, maybe?  

  

I love this.  It's a sleeve from a horrifying lilac linen jacket - plus sized with a very unflattering cut - it needed a change.  I laid it on top of a steel screen from our outdoor fire pit.  

I love the all over pattern from it.  

This sleeve I wrapped around a rusty wrench with some various washers and metal doo-dads added in.  Its pretty cool, too.

Psychedelic man!

And here's the shirt.  I think I like it.  I put it on a drain cover that I found on the side of the road several years ago.  I picked it up because...just because.  

This is the back.  I like the front better than the back.  I covered the stain I wanted to cover.  But all over, I'm not nuts about the look.  It looks stained more than dyed.

Here's the apron with my bonus shadow.  The apron just looks dirty to me.

Up close, if I were to take the time to appreciate the details, I like them.

But parts also just seem dirty to me.  I think I like the all over patterns better.  The splotchy bits don't work for me at all.  

Next time - and there will be a next time - I might pick up some iron oxide powder.  You can sprinkle it on the fabric and it colors more of it.  I'm hoping the color will look more intentional.  

Also, it took more than 24 hours because we moved the rusty pieces around to different parts of fabrics to dye more of it.  The difference between vinegar and salt was only in the smell.  I didn't see a difference.  

We learned a ton.  We'll be trying this out again maybe on a smaller scale.  I laid out a tarp in the driveway and it took up lots of space.  Jennifer came up with the idea of just putting a piece in a plastic bin.  We could always have a piece rusting if we chose to.  It takes up less space and probably wouldn't stain the drive way.  Oh yeah, I stained the driveway.  

Rust Dyeing

Time to try something new.  

It seems a little whack-a-doo but that never stops me from trying something.  

In fact, it kinda makes it more tempting, doesn't it?

The idea is pretty simple.  You take some metal that will rust and put it on or wrap it in some fabric.

Get them wet to encourage rusting.  

We added vinegar to some of the pieces and salt water to others to see which would encourage rusting  better.

I'm thrilled to be rusting this shirt.  It's an Alabama Chanin design that I made with an old tee-shirt.  It fits me really well but I stopped sewing at this point when I saw the very light but also really big stain on the front.  Oh, that's why that shirt was in the thrift shop.  So I'm rusting over the stain here, fingers crossed.

Bottle caps on a linen sleeve that is resting on a grate.

Soaking some washers and bottle caps in salt water.

The tool chest, including my ubiquitous cup of tea.

I looked for spray bottles at the dollar store but couldn't find any so I bought these cool water cannon things.  

Way more fun to use than spray bottles.

These are Jennifer's pieces, at least one is destined to be an apron.

Then we covered everything with a tarp.  We just need to keep it wet and hope for the best.  It should take about 24 hours to get rusted.  

Have you ever rust dyed? I'm curious to hear about people's experiences.  

Busy

Some of the things that have been keeping me busy lately. 

Dying with rust.  That will get it's own post soon.  It's totally fun.

A name tag challenge via my Modern Quilting Guild.  I used some of the linen that we dyed with indigo and was inspired by denim badges of the seventies.  Funny how even when I don't use denim, I use denim...sort of.

And my parents have been visiting.  During which time, my husband and father put up a shed and we (Well, mostly they and a little bit I) built a coop and run for the chickens.  It's not quite done yet but it's incredible sturdy and I'm thrilled with it.  

Jennifer Napkins

I decided to sew napkins yesterday.  

I figured they needed the largest bit of uninterrupted fabric.  Everything else that I'm itching to make (quilts, bags, journal covers) can be put together with scraps.  I guess napkins could too but they I think the fewer seams they have the better. 

They were already folded up in the napkin basket when I took these pictures.  That's why they're all wrinkly

I made five napkins.  Once I settled on what to make, it went pretty fast.

Top half was a shirt - see the darts?  I unstitched them  after dying.  I think they look pretty cool.  The bottom half was a skirt panel with embroidery.  I french seamed the two together.

I should tell you that we are big cloth napkin users.  We don't even own paper napkins.  I grew up using paper towels but only if needed - like with ribs.  Usually, we just used our sleeves.  

My husband grew up with paper napkins. He used several per meal.  It took us some time to find the middle ground of cloth napkins.  They are very handy and you can take them anywhere.  These are our first linen napkins and we feel pretty fancy.   

Small napkins work well too.  

We really like using cloth napkins now.  We keep them in a basket near the table so we can grab them as needed.  Our napkin basket is a real hodgepodge.  We actually still have some napkins from out wedding (20 years this summer).  There are lots and lots of napkins that I've sewn over the years and none of them really match.  

Since this had been a shirt, it wasn't quite big enough to cut out so I just left out a corner.  Everything I dyed had been thrifted, that's how we ended up with these big blotches when we dyed them.  I don't know what they were dirty with, some kind of oil probably, and the wax didn't take there.  All part of the adventure.

I'm a huge fan of the random and find things that are too consistent looking to be annoying.  I can accept that about myself as part of my aesthetic now, instead of a weird quirk.  It's just who I am.  So, with that in mind, the napkins I sewed yesterday are pretty random, in size, shape and patterns.  

They are Jennifer napkins.

I left the the curve of the hem of the skirt intact.  :)

You know what I need?

You know what I need?  A sewing machine with an attached laptop.  So I can blog, look at Pinterest, check Ravelry and listen to Podcasts while I sew - one action smoothly transitioning to the next without having to interrupt my flow.

But my flow is temporarily interrupted for the best reason.  I have wanted indigo dyed linen to play with since the first time I saw boro quilts and fell in love with them.  Now I have some and I can think of too many things to do and I want to do each one equally as much as the others.

I want to make a traditional quilt.

I want to make a small "art quilt" to hang.

I want to make some pogaji with enclosed seams.

Also, napkins and a small bag and a journal cover.

I want to embroider on it.

These things aren't all mutually exclusive.  

I could embroider a napkin or make a quilted journal cover.

Gratuitous close up

I want to make it all all at once.  Kind of like how I want to surf the internet, sew and listen to stuff all at once.  It's like this weird energy I'm stuck in right now.  In the pause between paragraphs, I've been threading my sewing machine, gathering supplies, answering emails and making my plans. 

To do everything at once.  

What the hell, flow?