Snow dyeing at the retreat

Getting ready to dye! We were all dressed up in plastic bags to protect our winter coats.  This time we left the containers outside overnight as we didn't have a place to let them thaw, much less be rinsed out in the convent.  It was a lot of fun, it was snowing, and not too cold.

Below are pictures from my piece.  I had supported the fabric with a piece of carpet underlay and in the second picture you will see that it has left an imprint.  Now how to figure out how to do that all the time!

The colours used were Forest Green, Golden Yellow and Black.  Hmm, you'd never have guessed, right!

Snow dyeing

I did some more snow dyeing, thank goodness indoors.  It was -25ºC outside.  

It's interesting to see the more rounded markings that are produced, quite different from the sharp "frost on the window" effect with low water immersion.  

This one was done with slate blue, olive with a touch of orange.

 

 This was olive, orange and cherry black.  

More sunshine

A good day to bake bread!  It's cold and sunny and since the wind wasn't too bad we had a good walk with the dog this morning.  He doesn't seem to notice how cold it is at all.  

This bread recipe comes from a 30 year old cookbook, but it's the same  recipe that my Finnish grandmother made all the time.  Fresh bread would be waiting for us when we got up in the morning (and we were early risers!)  I would certainly love to know her now and show her all the things that I do that she spent her life doing - sewing, quilting, preserving.  

My passion fruit vine is beside a cold window that gets lots of light.  But it still surprises me when it blooms.  Only for a day or so, but still a lovely burst of colour.

Clivia

With the temperature outside hovering around -20ºC it's nice to have some flowers indoors.  The Christmas cacti are all spent so it's nice to see the flowers on this clivia.

Snow dyeing and Charity quilts

This has been a charity sewing month.  Our guild has a Sew-in for the January meeting and so we bring our machines, rotary cutters and mats and get to work on whatever project has been organised for us.  This year we made maple leaves for Quilts of Valour.  It's a group that donates quilts to Canadian soldiers wounded in action.   I also managed to sew a small cuddle quilt which had been pre-cut.  Giving me that and another cuddle quilt to take home, quilt up and finish.  And I finished a quilt that my 89 year old mother in law had mostly done.  So that's quilted up and done!

As a break I decided to do some snow dyeing as I will be doing a workshop at our guild retreat at the end of the month.

We haven't had a huge amount of snow, but there always seems to be a few centimetres of fresh stuff on the ground.  Enough, anyway, to do some snow dyeing.  I followed the instructions in the AQS magazine which required a lot more dye than I would normally use, but to much greater effect than I had produced in the past.  And this time there were some wonderful designs that were produced.

and  on the right is a bit of detail.

this had been dyed with gold, some very old black, and marine violet - the blues really don't like the snow dyeing process!

This was a scarf that I put in with the top piece.