Brand New Dye

Here are my new fabric dyes for this year. The Procion dye has a limited shelf life in unused form, so I get all new each spring.

These are the colors I picked this year. It's the same yellow and same blue I bought last year, but I picked a new black and blue and red and purple.


Purple is the only secondary color I bought. Orange and green are easy to make, but when I've made purple, its been dull. Last year I bought purple already made and it was better. I can adjust it by adding blue or red, but I find that I have to start with purple dye.

I'll try mixing red and blue this year too. Maybe these versions of red and blue will work better.

I dyed it so parts of the fabric would dye lighter and I could get a better feel for the color. I like the brown better than last year's. Last year's was too red and I had to adjust it a lot.


This black is good too. Last years black had a green tinge that I didn't like.

I also made green and orange by adding each seperately to the dye bath in different places so I could get a good picture of how they blended.

My first project will be floor cloths. I have some 10oz cotton duck. I cut two pieces about 2x3 and preshrunk them on big plastc pipes. I'm just waiting for them to dry.

I guess the 10oz duck will be my new thing for June.


On Sunday, I fired up the Juki LZ and got it threaded with some 40wt poly thread. This was the first time I used the new bobbin case and the thread I got from ThreadArt.

I quilted a saddlepad panel. It was fun. I was afraid at first because the machine is so powerfull. But I got used to it.

Mary Shelley and Whiskers are not used to me being in the garage, but the machine is set up there. They argued about which one of them got to sit next closest to me.

Dave and Joseph helped me a lot yesterday, Monday. Both had the day off. They came to the barn and cleaned out the water trough that Janow shares with Mucha. They saved the mosquito fish and scooped about two gallons of black goop out of the bottom after they siphoned out the water. Janow drops mouthfulls of food in it.


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Community Quilts and Crickets

Hre are some pictures of the Community Quilt I recently finished machine quilting. I used my Juki TL98e.

Community Quilts is a program run by Piecemakers Quilt Guild volunteers. They plan the quilts and get members to help make them. Each quilt is the combined effort of many people. I took this one to quilt. The top had already been pieced, I just quilted it and bound it.

These quilts are made mostly of donated materials. They go out to the community through various organizations. They go to children removed from domestic violence, cancer patients, victims of disaster like housefires.

Milpitas Unified School District has spring break this week. After years of waiting for things to get back to normal, I realize normal is a myth. Every day is the same in it's unpredictability. Yesterday brought a trip to the feedstore for fly spray, crickets, laying pellets, sunflower seeds and a cat toy.

The cat toy was for Whiskers, but she knew right away that An-Jan bags often contain baggies of crickets. Live crickets. She loves bags of live crickets. So I distributed the crickets: six or eight for Liz, One for Whiskers, and the rest for Paula and Chica. Paula and Chica go bannanas when they see the cricket baggy. They peck up the left-over crickets at about two crickets per second per bird. The crickets don't have a chance. I got back inside just in time for Whiskers to throw up her cricket on the floor. I was ready for it, happens every time.

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Machine Quilting

Here is the shoo-fly quilt I am machine quilting.It is a Piecemakers Quilting Guild of Southern Alameda County Community Quilts project. We make over a hundred quilts a year and donate them to different charities in the community. Most of the materials are donated, much by guild members. Different people will design the quilt and cut it. Then it gets packaged into kits. It may be a few blocks to make, or completed block to assemble into the top. Members take a kit at general meetings to work on at home.
They range in size from lap quilts to wrap around you whilke you sit, to preemie infants quilts that make the incubators look less sterile.
We also have tie-ins, where many of us get together and set up frames and tie them to finsih them.