YouTube

I belong to a union that wants to ban YouTube because of incidents of bullying. No-one can condone this kind of behaviour but I do think that it is naive to imagine that a ban is the answer, our only weapon is education. Our children have grown up in a digital age and if one door is closed they will open another.

The other side of this coin is that whilst YouTube has developed a reputation for carrying undesirable material it is also a wonderful resource for education:

Indigo

After the last round robin which my group is in the throws of putting the last stitches to, in time for Harrogate, we felt we needed a bit of respite. So this time instead of doing a quilt each we're doing one between us - seven quilters = seven colours = a rainbow. We put the colours in the hat and I picked out red, my favourite. At first I was delighted but when I thought about it I realised that I could do red standing on my head - so I offered to swap. Not a good move, now I have indigo. After dyeing the colour wheel I felt reasonably well equipped to try dying tints of indigo. The first attempt 10 parts blue to one red was far too blue. I tried again, 9 parts blue to one part red, using the last of the blue dye and although I'm pleased with the tints - this is definitely not indigo. Obviously there are blues and blues ....

It worked!

After a slight delay whilst I got over an unknown aching lurgy and a cold (simultaneously!), during which time the fabric sat in the dye bath, I have finished:

The second colour wheel was created by adding a second piece of fabric to each dye bath thereby using up the excess dye. I've never had such light pieces in my stash before - it'll be interesting to see where they end up!

Go placidly amid the noise and haste....

I have rediscovered the joy of dyeing the slow way. My recent attenpts at dyeing have been hasty affairs, using an old microwave and snatched attempts at getting the required colour.

Having read Ineke Berlyn's book "Landscape in Contemporary Quilts" when it first came out, I was finally putting it away when I came across her recipe for dying a colour wheel. I've several books on dyeing but Ineke's recipe seemed simple enough so I decided to have a go and love the little bags of fabric sitting and curing. I just hope the final results are as good as they promise:

Dyed

This has taken several dye baths to reach this level of colour. It didn't help that the first lot of Procian I tried must have been well past it's 'use by' date! But this is the effect I was hoping for - something aged/inexplicable.