Shrivel up and dye !

First, Carol showed her 'Subsoil' piece she had entered for the recent Bristol Embroiderers' Guild exhibition.

It had been a challenge to incorporate a hessian sack as part of the piece.Carol had used the sack as the base adding in all manner of embroidered and appliquéd items you would normally see below soil.It was an inspired piece of divergent thinking ,beautifully executed.It will probably put in an appearance at Nature in Art in November.

Next she brought along the results of a recent Quilters Guild workshop with Mary Mackintosh

The fabric above was used to back the stitched piece below,Arctic wool fleece from Whaleys I think.

Lots of different fabrics were stitched to the backing ,using cotton threads ,before dyeing with procion dyes.The fabrics take up the dye differently.

Below you can see the intensive stitching before the whole piece is washed 

which causes it to shrink and distort .

Here another piece already dyed but not yet washed.

We welcomed back Deryll this month who is recovering from a hip replacement operation.She is doing very well but understandably has not been using her creative muscles .However ,her contribution was instructions she had unearthed about Exchange dyeing.

We were interested to know how it worked.The idea is to have two dye baths in Primary colours e.g.blue ,yellow.The first  fabrics are dyed the original colour, yellow,then you'd add say a yoghurt pot of blue to the yellow dye pot and dye more fabric.You keep doing this until the dye is used .You should get fabrics in tones of the Secondary colour as you see above in Deryll's sample sheet .Looks like an interesting exercise.