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.

some quiltlets

 This little nosegay block was given to members of our guild by Diane Shink, an AQS appraiser and collector extraordinaire of old blocks, star quilts and vintage aprons.  She asked us to produce a 15" block and we were allowed to do whatever we wanted with this.  Many chose to deconstruct it, but I thought that I would give it a new look and leave it as what it was - a nosegay of flowers.  

     

And here it is.                                                                             

Below is a piece made with a picture that I took of a small lake on a golf course, early on a November morning.  It was done as a challenge for our 12bythedozen blog.  Reflections was the theme.  The size is 12"x12".

 

Swiss Rail Tour

Our Swiss Rail Tour with IRT and Great Rail Journeys started in London with a Eurostar train to Cologne where we spent the first night.  The hotel was a 2 minute walk to the cathedral so we had a quick look before it got too dark to see (hence no pictures!)  

The next day we went to St Mortiz via the Euro-City along the Rhine for much of the way.  Lovely scenery.

Our first excursion out of St Moritz was on the narrow gauge Bernina Express to Tirano in Italy and we were able to travel in this old Pullman coach which had been very lovingly restored inside.

 This lake marks the divide of the watershed in Europe.  Again spectacular views of the mountains.

 Going down the valley into Tirano was breathtaking.  I'll have to stop using all these adjectives, but we were lucky with the weather and to see the snowcapped mountains surrounding the valley was beautiful.

 This little section of track is a world heritage site.  It's quite old and a very tight circle for the train to turn on.

 A small section of the old part of Tirano.  The local dish there is pizzoccori which we enjoyed for lunch-pasta made with buckwheat, and mixed with cabbage and potatoes and cheese, then baked.  Delicious!

 There we are standing on Piz Nair overlooking St Moritz.  Lots of snow up top, but the ski season hasn't quite started.

 And the view of St Moritz from across the lake at the foot.  A lovely hour's walk around the lake.  To save trekking up the roads to the hotels, the town has installed elevators and escalators to get people up to the main section - it would have been quite the hike otherwise to get to our hotel (the Monopol - very nice).

Our next train trip was the Glacier Express and on our arrival in Zermatt we passed this lovely old building on our way to our hotel (the Park hotel Beau Site) -another excellent one.

 Zermatt has a section in town of these old buildings- and many more can be seen up the mountain side.

 The cog railway up to Gornergrat took us to the top where we were able to sit outside and enjoy the scenery - so many glaciers and when the clouds are gone (which they weren't) a view of the Matterhorn.

 And this was the train.

 Another outing had us on the train to Stresa on Lake Maggiore in Italy.  Our tour of the lake was cancelled due to the races of these gigantic boats.  Lots of noise and rooster tails, and we watched one race but that was more than enough.

 And finally the Matterhorn!  We knew it was there all along, but clouds were constantly covering all or part of it.  On our last day we took three gondolas up to Kleine Matterhorn and instead of taking the last one down, we walked - it was a glorious day and it was definitely Heidi country.

 On top of Kleine Matterhorn

 If you look really hard, you will see the ski tows and skiiers  below.  They drop down from where I am standing to take the picture and ski on the glacier year round.