Eco dyeing

 Today we had a great talk from Diane Morgan about her adventures with eco-dyeing. Diane lives in Brittany and also brought lots of lovely French textiles for us too. She give us lots of really interesting and useful information about her process, from scouring and mordanting fabric to the the placement of leaves and botanicals; she also explained the use of an 'iron blanket'. To top it all shelf us with detailed instructions so we can all have a go.

Not content with dyeing her fabrics she also makes some beautiful books and labels with dyed paper. Claire and Sue did a turn on the catwalk with some clothes that had been dyed. Diane made a lovely cushion for us to raffle too, so we had a really enjoyable morning.

And of course there was the usual stitching

Sue had been on an Anne Brooke course

Inktense

 Well, we made it to the meeting in spite of the weather doing its level best to disrupt things in recent days. We had a lovely day, led by one of our members Jackie, on using Inktense pencils.

                                                                

The lovely flowers in Jackie's lockdown quilts are fabric coloured with Inktense pencils and then blended with aloe vera gel. We experimented and found hand sanitiser gel works fine too! 

The first job was some individual leaves (Jackie has a cunning plan for these!).

Then we tackled some roses. It was really good fun and thanks go to Jackie for the time and effort spent in preparing all the materials for us to play with.

Here's one of Jackie's finished pieces which she has quilted trapunto style...

...And some of the variations we produced on the day.