Getting Started - Karen S

I was waiting for the weather to improve -- but I'm running out of month.  I did these in my kitchen yesterday.  I used lemon yellow, golden yellow, red, and deep purple.  

Now on to the cutting and pleating!

Better Late than Never Right?

I know I'm coming a bit late to the party with this one but since it uses two things taught on this blog recently, I just wanted to share what I made using those bits.

Recently I came across the phrase "Intuitive Design". Don't know what it means to anyone else but I chose to just take a piece and see where it lead me.  The background is on a small piece of silk velvet dyed purple (or painted - I'm not sure as it was a gift). Then I just started grabbing things and auditioning them and moving them until I liked it.  No pre-set plan or goal...just fun. Only thing I knew was that I wanted to play with some Extreme Texture!

I had done some of the 3-D polyester using the technique posted by Nienke in October
(link: http://andthenwesetitonfire.blogspot.com/2012/10/3d-shibori-on-polyester.html)
It was great and I loved the effect but just couldn't think of anything to do with my greenish-bronze polyester.

Then there were some very organically made beads in Beth Berman's posts on Embellishments.
(link:    http://andthenwesetitonfire.blogspot.com/2013/01/bead-organization-and-other-elements.html )
I had some painted Tyvek hanging around, got out my heat gun and went to work.

Finally, I combined all these ingredients (and a few more) and came up with Sour Grapes

Sour Grapes

So as I look forward to a lot more inspiration on this blog and having lots more experiments to play with, I think my version of Intuitive Design will be happening again!

My Try at 3-D Shibori--Quilter Beth

I finally had a chance to try this month’s technique. I didn’t have time to run out to get some marbles and cool polyester fabric, but I had some poly on hand from when we did a method where we actually “set fabrics on fire.” I used plastic buttons of varying sizes and tied them up in the polyester with crochet thread. Here is what it looked like when I had it tied up.

Once I got it all tied up, I plunked it into some BOILING water and kept it from floating by placing another pan on top.

After 30 minutes of boiling, I used tongs to remove the fabric from the boiling pot and placed it into a pan of ice water. I then placed it on a towel to dry. Here is my finished product.

Before I got this posted, I had time to try some more experiments. Nienke and I had the same idea about using rocks and disperse-dyed fabric. This time, in addition to the buttons, I decided to try the process with rocks and those rounded glass pieces you put into a vase to secure the stem of a flower. Disperse dyeing was one of our previous projects here on the Fire blog, so I decided to use some of that fabric for this project. Here are the pieces before the process.

Fabrics tied and ready to boil.

Here I have untied the pieces after boiling, dunking into ice water, and drying.

I really like the texture achieved with this technique. I was looking at these pieces and trying to decide which shapes appeal to me the most. I think I'd have to choose the rocks; I like that all the shapes are not uniform. I’m thinking several pieces done like this might look really cool “caged” in my bias strips for a new piece in my series.

Oh and if you’d like to see how I have actually used some of the beautiful fabrics we have created on the Fire blog, check out my post here. In the piece I have shown, I have used hand-dyed flour-paste-resist fabric, sugar-syrup-resist fabric, and snow-dyed fabric in the piece.