It's been a while ...

Happy 4th everyone!

It's been a while since I've posted anything.  June is always one of the worst months for me at work, so there hasn't been much free time.  Whatever time I had, I worked on all the swap blocks that I committed to and for the first time, I was late on a couple of blocks.  It was not a good feeling!

You can check out my Flickr photostream to see the recent blocks that I've made.  I made over 60 blocks for the various swaps because for some of them, I had to make multiple blocks.

When I played hooky from making the blocks, I've been trying out a new technique with dyeing.  I saw a quilt in which the quilter used washable Elmer's glue gel as a resist for the dye, and it was beautiful!  A resist keeps the dye out of wherever it is applied so that you can apply different color dyes in the same area.  Once you wash out the glue, anywhere where it is applied stays the color of the original fabric. 

I tried to find a tutorial, but couldn't find anything that was detailed.  So I tried out what I thought was the process and tweaked it until I got the results I wanted.  Here is the most successful of my attempts:

I used Kona White as the base and applied the glue in a wavy grid pattern.  Once the glue dried, I painted each section with Dye-na-flow silk paint, which works like dye.  Some of the paint flowed into other sections, so I have to figure out how to fix that, but I really liked the white outline caused by the glue.  I want to try a drawing next to see how it goes. 

First, though, I need to get all the June swap blocks out of the way ... :)